This year, Chris and I had our not-quite-annual Solstice Party. It was last night.
We spent a long time deciding what beverages to serve.
“No one likes wassail, not even you,” he said This was in reference to my many efforts to re-create an authentic wassail. I read once in a culinary history book that original wassail is a combination of ale and wine, mulled. I don’t recommend it, and I am not going to make it that way ever again, although the Velvet Cup continues to intrigue me.
Eggnog? Of course! How not?
Mulled wine? Honestly, I don’t like it that much.
Hot spiced cider? Definitely. And, although it does benefit from the addition of Applejack, it’s a great non-alcoholic beverage to serve at parties.
Chris is a great bartender and planned to serve mixed drinks. This is the secret to what makes our parties fun, but in addition to the made-to-order, I wanted to add something festive, and potent.
We looked through our drink guides — plenty of ideas but nothing was quite what I wanted. Something kept tickling the back of my brain.
Fish House Punch.
It falls under the category of Things I Know That I Don’t Know That I Know. The unknown knowns.
I googled, of course, and got a ton of history and several promising recipes. I read them.
“That’s not right,” I said over and over again. It should have X, or Y, or different proportions, or different ingredients.
Why on earth is there a recipe for Fish House Punch in my brain? It’s not on the whiteboard of things I’ve forgotten. It’s a recipe I definitely know — how else can I read a recipe and say, “No, not that. This!” It’s in there somehow. But how?
Is it one I learned from my grandmother? I don’t think so. I have vague memories of her talking about Fish House Punch, and I think the phrases “never again” and “drove the car into a tree” were involved somehow.
I dug deeper into the recesses of memory. Something about the Phi Sci fraternity at Swarthmore College, or more likely the University of Pennsylvania, and a bowl of punch with lemon slices floating in it. I remember a blue sweater I used to wear, one that belonged to a friend of mine, but that was fabulously flattering on me, and that I borrowed sometimes when we went to parties. I have a vague memory of someone telling me that the State burned down a few years ago, back then, which it did, it turns out, and that his father was a member of that ancient club, a citizen, and that he knew the recipe, and then told me what it was.
Memory is unreliable. This much has been proven. We invent and imagine in equal proportions and call it memory.
And yet, the evidence stands. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind is the recipe for Fish House Punch, with the feeling that it’s the real one, and that it is a secret, and somehow I am privy to it. Did some young buck, 24 years ago, give it to me for the price of a smile, and maybe a kiss on the cheek?
Why, when so much of what I have learned over the course of half a lifetime has faded, did that stick? What other secrets are lurking, locked in the recesses of my psyche?
Is it the real recipe? It’s close enough to what I could discover with a quick internet search. Studying culinary history makes me think that my recipe is a likely contender for authentic. Who is to know for sure except the few aging men who are members of the Schukyll Fishing Company, and they are not telling.
Chris was unenthusiastic. Anything that smacks of elitism, of exclusion, of restricting good things to a privileged few is anathema to him. “Make your punch, but leave me out of it,” he said. And so I did. And we served it last night, with the caveat that it will f@ck you up.
Our guests were at first surprised at my choice of language, but then they said, “Yes, it will.”
It’s good stuff, and it does make for a good party. Several people asked me for the recipe.
I don’t know how I know it, but I do know that I promised to keep it a secret. It’s very similar to what you can find online.
I haven’t written anything in a while. My car has been in the shop. Ordinary people can go through life with a car that needs repairs and not have an emotional meltdown, but evidently not me. I’ve been a mess.
We weren’t sure what was wrong with my car. It made a noise like this: rrrRRRRRrrrRRRrrr and the “Check Engine” light kept coming on. It’s been in and out of the shop since June. The original dealership we went to, the one close to my house, failed to fix the problem after over $1500 or so of repairs to this and that sensor and system, so I tried another dealership, one far from my house, but with a much better mechanic.
It took three trips up to the dealership in Frisco, which is very far from where I live, to finally figure it out, but they eventually found a small intake leak in the fuel-air system of the car. It’s fixed and I’m finally coming out of the emotional tree I’ve been hiding in.
Here’s what kept sending me over the edge: I kept saying, about my car, “There is something mechanically broken, a leak somewhere” and they kept telling me it was a sensor issue.
Kind of like when I was sick with advanced cancer spreading all over my body and I kept saying “something is very very wrong with me” and people kept telling me to get therapy, that it was normal for new mothers to feel exhausted, that it was “all in my head.” A sensor issue.
With the exception of my mother, my husband, and my wonderful friend from Tokyo, everyone who told me that I sounded like I was depressed, or that what I was feeling was normal has been expunged from my present life so effectively that I can’t even remember who I eliminated, but I do remember throwing away my address book, and I haven’t sent out Christmas cards in years because I don’t want to think about the people who aren’t on my Christmas card list any more. They’re not on my facebook page either, so I doubt they’ll read this blog, and even if they do, they won’t recognize their actions as having been hurtful.
Insisting on telling your friend who is months away from death from a case of undiagnosed advanced cancer, and who is saying to you, “Something is wrong, I think I am going to die, and it’s not depression,” that it’s all in her head, that she is depressed and in denial about it, or that everyone feels that way and she is being overly dramatic and needs to not be such a drag, is understandable, but that doesn’t excuse it.
When your friend tells you that “Something is wrong, and I don’t know what it is,” here is what you say:
“I’m sorry. That stinks. Thank you for confiding in me. I hope you are able to figure it out, and please let me know if I can do anything to help.”
Period.
I thought I was over it, but evidently not.
I know it’s hard to find a leak in a car, especially when mechanics are trained to rely on the self-diagnostic system that shows codes for what is wrong with the car but can’t pin down a leak. Sensor issues.
I know, in theory, that it’s hard to diagnose cancer that hasn’t shown any symptoms.
And I also know that plenty of people walk around saying, “Something is wrong with me” and spend hundreds of thousands on unnecessary medical tests because they’re depressed and in denial, or because they like the attention.
Nevertheless:
Just because your car’s internal diagnostic system keeps throwing up sensor codes doesn’t mean that there isn’t an underlying mechanical problem.
And if you feel crappy all the time, like you are about to die, it might mean that you have cancer and it is about to kill you.
It’s not all in your head.
I’m glad my car is fixed; however, I cannot help but fret that something else in my life will crop up and send me into a tailspin.
Just because I am paranoid does not mean they are not out to get me? And I haven’t even touched on “what if my cancer comes back.” Thank goodness there’s a sensor light for that.
My mother has a big personality. She has a big heart to go along with that personality, thank goodness. And she has a big sense of humor.
One of the recurring themes in my conversations with her throughout her life, and mine, has gone like this:
Mom: “When you give my eulogy, I want you to roast me.”
Me: …
Mom: “I mean it. If you say something all sappy and sentimental, I’ll rise up out of my coffin and get you.”
Me: “You know, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, when Sam gives the eulogy to the mule? It’s out of this world funny. Is that what you want? A muleogy?”
My mom has been extremely ill this fall, which has had me worried. Because I have a lot of personal experience with going to the bad place, I know exactly how to channel all that nonspecific anxiety about my mother: into specific anxiety that I will have to give her eulogy. Because you know I will. Thank goodness I will, because if I do, it means she won’t have had to give mine. What on earth will I say? Now that my mom is doing better (and she is!) I can bear to think about it.
Here is what I will say.
My mother made me promise to get up here in front of you all and roast her.
One of the most important things she taught me was to keep my promises. “Your word is more than your bond,” she said. “It is who you are. You speak correctly, you always tell the truth, and you keep your promises. Without your word, you are nothing.”
If you are your word, then my mother was an awful lot, because, honestly, I think this is the first chance I’ve ever had to have a conversation with my mother without her interrupting me, right here, right now. It’s a Cuban thing. And believe me, if she could interject, she would.
My mother would call and I’d say “I’m dying to talk to you, but I have, like, two minutes to talk,” and an hour later, I’d be an hour late for whatever it was that I had to do, still on the phone. We’d hang out, talking, and look at the clock and it would be four in the morning. We’d go out for lunch, always, and our food would get cold because our mouths would be too busy to eat.
That’s a lot of words. All of them true. All of them thoughtful, thought-provoking. All of them interesting. All of them kind. None of them mean, petty, mean-spirited, gossipy. Not one. None of them boring. Hardly any of them about her, unless I pressed.
Here are some of the words I remember:
I can’t have friends who judge me by the state of my house. I love this one. I really, really love it. It makes me happy when my friends come over in the morning and my kids’ breakfast dishes are still on the table and I can be comfortable with that. It makes me happy when I visit other friends’ houses and their kids’ breakfast dishes are still on the table, and I can be comfortable with that, too. No one is perfect, and when we stop trying to act like we are, then we can see each other as who we really are, like that great song that Harry Belafonte wrote for The Muppet Show.
People are more important than things. The other day, I let my daughter wear a ring-earring-necklace set of jewelry my husband gave me. It’s a nice set, but not so nice that my heart would stop if she lost a piece, and I told her that. The ring, a little too big for her, disappeared.
“Are you mad?” she kept asking.
“No,” I kept repeating. “Just keep an eye out for it.”
“Is this why you let me wear it? So I could learn to take care of things and not lose them?”
“No. I let you wear it so that you would learn that it is better to use the nice things you have, and lose or break them, than to leave them in the cabinet or drawer. And I am not mad at you for losing it because your feelings are more important than my ring.” She did find the ring a little while later.
I can’t ever remember my mother breaking or losing anything, except one earring, once. By example, she taught me to take care of things, and by word and example, she taught me to not let things dominate me.
That’s a fad. I can’t quite encompass the derision in my mother’s tone of voice that accompanied those words. Not only have I saved hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars not buying into fads, but those three words taught me to take the long view. That’s a helluva life skill.
Pray. Prayer is private. I don’t remember seeing my mother pray, much, but she talked about prayer, and I learned to listen, and I learned that God does answer prayers, even if we don’t like God’s answer. The wisdom from my mother’s prayer life is to pray for God’s will to be done. It’s like the Chinese curse, only not a curse. I think. Anyway, I don’t pray for wisdom, strength, or courage. If anything, my prayer is of thanksgiving, for the gift of my mother.
Don’t underestimate your children. This is one she got from her mother. Another good piece of generational mothering advice is this: “Listen politely to what everyone has to say and then do what you were going to do anyway.”
I do wonder how much of who my mother is comes from her mother, and how much of it I’m going to be able to pass on to my daughter.
I could come up with funny anecdotes to illustrate each of these pearls of wisdom that my mother gave to me, and roast her in the way she envisioned, but I don’t want to. Her vision is to celebrate her wacky, zany sense of humor, but one of the greatest things about the way she makes us all laugh is that it is never, not remotely, cruel or mean, even in a joking way that typifies a roast. It would be funny, but if I wanted to honor my mother, I would have to be punny, and that’s only funny when it’s spontaneous.
Spontaneous.
My life with my mother has been full of “Oh my goodness, what on earth are you thinking, you can’t just up and DO that! Or can you?”
My mom has travelled across the world on five hours notice. I grew up thinking this was normal.
“You’d better do it while you can because you don’t know when you’ll get another chance.”
So Mom, I love you, and this one’s for you.
As sad as I am to find out via new reports that Aretha Franklin has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, all I can think of, besides “oh no!” is that whatever her future holds, she’s got a great hat to wear. And, yes, I will say a little prayer. Cancer is horrible, and when it strikes the great icons of our time, it’s horrible.
.
I sent in an email this morning to my kids’ teachers that said “They’re off their food, and they are complaining about stomach pain, and I don’t want them to get sick, so we are staying home to watch movies today and hopefully head off any illness.”
If I had been absolutely truthful, I would have said,
“My stomach started acting up this weekend because I ate some fiery hot salsa at an awesome Tex-Mex place even though I know better, and I spent half of it in bed and the other half in the bathroom, and I’ve spent two fucking years of my life puking, I’ve had enough of it. I hate puking. The last thing in the world I want is for my kids to puke anywhere near me, where I have to hear it or clean it up so if I think they might be getting sick, they’re staying on the sofa covered with blankets.
Furthermore, last weekend was busy and this week has been busy and next weekend is busy and I just need a day where I don’t have to get anyone up and fed and into a clean uniform.
I’m a complete laundry failure and they don’t have any clean uniforms.
I like my kids and I feel like hanging out with them all day. I’m having one of those moments where I think I’d like to home school. Or unschool them for a year or four. They’re smart little monsters — they can pick up what they’ve missed later on. Besides, I might die and I want to spend as much time as I can with them while I can. So they won’t be in school today.”
That last one sounds morbid. I am not feeling particularly morbid (today), but it’s the reality of my life. I also like my kids, so spending time with them is a bonus — and I’m glad we appear to have averted the stomach bug by staying home today. Knock wood.
I found out via facebook that a friend’s mom has been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. I knew what this was immediately — reading the medical press will do that to a girl — but if you don’t know, it’s spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, only when it strikes people it’s not called mad cow disease, it’s called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or, if you are member of the Fore tribe of New Guinea, it’s called Kuru. No matter what it’s called, it’s a bad one.
Of course, this brings up a plethora of my own bad feelings. I’ve been in a crappy mood all day. I overslept on purpose, and then I was so unreasonably bitchy over coffee with some friends this morning that one of them put me in the time out chair for a couple of minutes. Then I freaked out over a small errand that had a big context. I started crying inexplicably in the car. I hate that. It doesn’t happen very often.
The day got a little better when I decided to come home and do the following job off of my to-do list: spread 160 lbs of composted manure all over my front yard. The plan is that it will slowly work its way down into the sandy rock (or is it rocky sand?) pretending to be dirt under most of the new grass I’ve planted in front of my house, help fertilize the roots of my new lawn, and help hold in moisture.
When you are in a bad mood, nothing beats spreading a little manure around. I was over halfway through when I identified what was bugging me: just a general mad at the world over the unfairness of my friend’s mom getting such a rotten break. I’m sensitive to stuff like that.
Figuring out what was gnawing at my craw was a good thing. I’m on the alert not to let myself snap at my kids over doing normal kid stuff.
My kids are great, and I know my time with them is limited. That’s a kind of rotten knowledge to have learned the hard way, but I hope if I work through it I can turn it into some sort of motherhood-fertilizer rather than just a pile of crap.
All the way to twelve.
That’s how many jars of maraschino cherries I ordered from Tillen Farms.
It has taken us a year to go through the two jars that Chris found in his stocking last Christmas, but most of that cherry consumption has been in the past two months.
One jar of cherries per month for the next year is going to mean a lot of parties.
We have lots to celebrate.
We had some friends over on Tuesday. It put me back a day preparing for Thanksgiving dinner, but our Thanksgiving was quiet, so it worked out.
During the course of dinner, I happened to describe myself as a liberal. Our friend Daniel said “You know, Elizabeth, you’re not. You’re a moderate. Don’t try to hide it.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I am.”
Chris, who had been drinking wine as well as a vile concoction I kicked up involving Cointreau, amaretto, vodka, lemon juice, fresh citron, and maraschino cherries, chimed in, “She’s not that either. She’s a contrarian.”
There’s a Tom Swiftie lurking in there, but I could not put my finger on it then, nor can I now.
Instead, I whined. “Well. I think it’s important to examine many different points of view,” and hid behind my wine glass. It was VERY good wine to go with the 2″ filets Chris had grilled up.
Gale shot me a look and said, in her sultriest voice, “Candy is bad.”
I’m the mom who grumps at candy in birthday party favor bags, and the only reason I fill up my son’s birthday favor bags with it is that his birthday is 2 weeks after Halloween and I want to get it out of my house. I don’t even deny to my kids that I throw away as much of their candy as I can get away with, and they can’t so much as look at a fruit roll-up without getting a lecture on the science of adhesion and microbiotic activity resulting in tooth decay. I’m worse than a candy grinch. I’m a candy killjoy, and Gale knows this.
What could I say?
“Candy is good for toilet training. Candy is an important part of social ritual, as in piñatas and trick-or-treating. Making candy at home is fun, and good science,” I monotoned.
It’s true. I am a contrarian disguised as a moderate. I’m thankful for friends who have my number.
What are you thankful for?
Our new house has trees. Lots of them. It’s one of the reasons we bought the house.
I’ve already disendeared myself to my neighbors by chopping down the dying Arizona Ash that used to stand front and center of my house. Now I’ve got the tree guys here taking out three hackberries in the back yard.
There is nothing wrong with the trees, per se. It’s just that they are crowding out three American Elms. There’s not space for six mature trees where they are growing, and so I made a choice.
My garden already looks better.
I wonder what other major areas of clutter I have in my life that I could reduce by half to allow the things I value to flourish.
When I was a kid we went up to the mountains of North Carolina/Tennessee every summer. My mom’s mom was from that part of the world, and roots go deep.
My grandmother’s cousins, three old maids, lived in a beautiful old house in a small town, and on the wall of that house were many cross-stitched sayings, framed. One of them was this: “Make new friends, keep the old. One is silver, the other is gold.” I know this, I do, but I am terrible at following up. I can blame it on my peripatetic lifestyle, and also on my own personality that is perpetually looking forward, never back.
When I was diagnosed with cancer, I did make an effort to do some phone calling and emailing, letting my closest friends know my terrible news, so that they would not hear it from the grapevine and suffer hurt feelings that they didn’t hear it from me. I missed some people, and I feel mildly guilty about that, but I did the best I could, and one small silver lining of the whole experience has been getting back in touch people from my earlier lives.
Than *bam* along comes facebook and I’m overwhelmed with back-in-touch-ness. It makes me happy in a way nothing else can.
I got a facebook message from Jenny, my old housemate, about ten days ago, “I’m going to be in Dallas on business. Are you free next Friday evening?”
HECK YES!
Never have I so earnestly wanted my children to be at their very best.
I cheated.
Yes, I made them bathe and wear stain-free pajamas. But more, here is what I said.
“A wonderful thing is happening. My friend Jenny, who I used to live with before I married Daddy, is coming to see you.”
“Ginny? Like Ginny Weasley?”
“Almost. Her name is Jenny, not Ginny, and you will call her Aunt Jenny. But she is a LOT like Ginny Weasley. She looks like her, she is wonderful and kind like her. And if she were a witch like Ginny, you can bet that she would be a doozy of a good one. ” It does not hurt that my friend does resemble the actress who plays Ginny Weasley.
My kids were primed, and they delivered, with appropriate hugs and kisses and songs and as much charm as two small monst… I mean small children can spread on someone they want to like them. In their small minds, the next best thing to the real Ginny Weasley from the books was coming to see them. I have never been so proud of my kids.
Then they went to bed like little angels and Jenny and I stayed up half the night talking. Like the crew of the Pequod, we played show-and-tell with my surgical scars. We talked about her father, who died from cancer about ten years ago, so she understood a lot of what I had been through.
We talked about how friends can’t help as much as they want to. We talked about how my more liberal friends, focused on the big picture, made donations in my honor to breast cancer research organizations, whereas conservative friends, focused on the immediate need they could see, and their own experience, brought food. We talked about hats.
Jenny added something to my list of things friends can do for someone who has cancer: to go to the funeral. That’s a difficult truth to get my head around, but she is right.
We talked about the mood in Washington, DC, where she lives. We talked about how hard it is, and it is getting harder, to be both a Christian and a liberal, and how it just makes us want to stay home on Sunday morning rather than go and listen to the hate.
“When are you coming home,” she asked me, meaning back home to the East Coast.
That’s a tough call. First of all, it’s completely out of my hands, since our family’s location is always determined by my husband’s career. But there are more things to consider, and I thought about them this weekend.
“You could never afford a house like this anywhere on the East Coast,” she said. It’s true. Our house is huge, and we love it, and it fits our kinks.
I thought about my Dallas friends. They’re all new friends, because I’ve only lived here for six years. But if we stay here long enough for them to become old friends, that’s good too.
Another cross-stitched saying my grandmother’s cousins had on their wall was this one: “Home is where the heart is.”
Part of my heart will always remain back East. It’s where I’m from, and there are countless cultural nuances that make it so that Dallas will never, ever be home to me, not in the way that New York, or the mountains of East Tennessee, or the beaches of Miami, are home. I miss living back East, especially at Thanksgiving, where people really do sit around the table swapping stories about our Puritan ancestors. It’s not putting on the dog, even when my paternal grandmother lorded it over her husband because his family did not date back to the Mayflower, but only to the Speedwell. She really did, and it really bothered him, and he retaliated by bringing up his Algonquin forebears. Every year. Thanksgiving is our heritage, like St. Patrick’s Day is for the Irish and Columbus Day for Italians. When I see the kids at my kids’ school acting it out, like kids do all over the country, like it’s the story of “those pilgrims” and not “we pilgrims,” and I long to be home.
But then I look around at my friends here. Women and families who, for the most part, got to know me when I was in the belly of the whale, or had recently been regurgitated. There are not a lot of cities where someone could show up not knowing a soul, have a baby, and then get cancer within eighteen months and still make friends. Real friends. True friends. Not just sympathy friends. I don’t know what kind of reaction I would have gotten had shown up in a new city back East with cancer and two toddlers, but “Sucks for you,” comes to mind.
Dallas does not have mountains. We don’t have a beach. We don’t have 400 years of history, or if we do, it culminates in not forgetting the Alamo. We don’t have a long tradition of art museums or outstanding music, although that is changing and it’s exciting to watch the arts bloom before my eyes, and it’s great that I can actually get season tickets to the symphony.
When I moved here, I heard, over and over, “Dallas doesn’t have a lot, but it has the people, and that is why we all think it’s the best place in the country.”
Over and over again, I’ve been frustrated when people take it personally whenever I express my belief that Dallas is a fine city, but not the Promised Land that the people who live here seem to think it is. Now I begin to see why: the people who live here, the dominant culture, are what makes this city great. Of course they take it personally when I say it’s not my favorite. D’uh.
Maybe when I set the board for Thanksgiving Dinner come Thursday, I’ll honor the natives of this brave new world I’m living in and serve up a concoction of jello, canned fruit, and Cool-Whip. Sure, my Puritan ancestors might rise up out of their graves and come after me for committing such sacrilege, but I’m confident my new Texan compadres are more than capable of taking out of an army of Puritan zombies.
Dance with the Reaper 