Eggs Redux

Heard from the kitchen at 8:20 Thanksgiving morning “6.6 ounces is how many tablespoons?”  This is my husband, Robin, obsessing over how many chives to chop up for his deviled eggs.  Devilishly dim.

This saga is not over.  On November 5, Rob had offered to make these eggs for a Guy Fawkes Party.  The recipe (god only knows where he got it from but it did warn the cooks that deviled eggs are rather declasse.)  But whatever.

In this particular recipe one was directed to take the eggs (old eggs) out of the fridge to bring them to room temperature.  Then the eggs need to be laid on their sides for twenty-four hours.  Blankets are optional.  Turn the eggs occasionally.

Rob just asked me what a piper is.  I should have told him to hire a bag piper.He just told me to get out of his way in the kitchen when he’s working.  For Crissakes, they’re just eggs.

Back to the story.  So the eggs are laid on their sides whimpering like little babies and then the recipe tells him to put them in a pot with 2.2 cm of cold water.  Well that causes consternation all around.  “How much is that?”  yells Robin. Back to google.  He is then directed to boil the eggs for 12 minutes in water that is shivering.  That seems counter intuitive but oh well, I guess you can shiver from heat too.

Then, cool the eggs.  Their little shells should just fall off them.  Didn’t happen.  The eggs were not cooked on one side (the side that was out of the water and the peeling was impossible.  Instead of a nice little cup to hold the egg mixture, it looked like the aftermath of a particularly bad breakfast—shell and half cooked whites.

So this time he has purchased 16 boiled eggs out of their shells.  They are perfect.  They are a poem to oblong perfection.

Hire the piper.  I think this one’s a winner.

 

The most wonderful time of the year

I am tired of Christmas.  I am tired of Thanksgiving.  I want to scream   “STOP”.

I am tired of knocking ourselves out for Holidays and then acting like dicks the rest of the year.  I don’t want to shop, I don’t want to think about what I would like, I don’t want to struggle over how it’s all going to look.  I don’t want to struggle for parity.

These are the parts of Christmas I like:

1.  Getting the tree, picking it out and getting muddy and cold and then coming home to get warm.
2.   The air getting colder as if the world is tilting over into something new, a new year, a new start, a new chance.
3.   Decorating the tree and making frosted fruits and my Dad’s fudge.  Hanging my old friends on the tree—the stuffed elephant, pink pig and tree I made in New York for my first Christmas there forty some years ago.
4.   Drinking a scotch.  Talking to friends and family.  Laughing.  Remembering.
5.   Snow, if we have it.

These are the parts I detest:

1.  Trying to please everyone.
2. Dealing with everyone’s emotions.
3. Trying to make everyone happy.
4. Trying to find the perfect gift.
5. Trying, trying, trying.

Why the fuck am I trying so hard?  I am not in control of anyone’s Christmas but my own.  I am the only one whose Christmas I have a snowball’s chance in hell of effecting.

This is what I’m going to do:

1.  I am going to celebrate Christmas with my grandson.  Christmas is for children.  We have a child this year.  He is my Christmas.  He is our hope for a new year.  Wilder James.
2.   Do you remember that old game, Pick-up-Sticks?  This will be a pick-up-sticks Christmas.  Just let them fall where they may.   Let everyone be responsible for their own happiness at Christmas.  No guilt, no shame, no blame.  Just the joy of the season.

In  recognition of the true joy of Christmas, let me offer Buona Befana:

Isn’t she sweet?  She passes out goodies to children.  Notice her bedroom scuffs.  She’s my kind of woman.

Ruby Woo

I visited my sister Chris in South Dakota recently.  She and her husband are in the process (almost completed) of moving to a house closer in, somewhat smaller.  In the midst of the madness that is moving, Chris washes her hair, uses mousse , hairspray and puts herself together.

I have stopped putting myself together.  Sometimes I forget to look in the mirror for awhile.  I wander outside in my pajamas, no underwear and talk to the birds.  I am very interested in what is going on in the trees, in the sky, and on the ground.  I am frequently caught on our front walk by the school bus and wonder what the children see when they look out the window at me.  I wave.

When I was with Chris, she showed me how to do my hair.  Mousse is tricky and you’re supposed to get it underneath on your roots; I frequently miss and get it in my eyebrows and ears which is annoying.  Then, after moussing, you blow dry and then spritz yourself with hairspray.  Then you have a little bit of a helmet that stays out of your eyes.  Which is a good thing.  However if you move around a lot it comes down over your face all in one piece.

I am a girl again.  I look pretty good when it’s all done, but then of course, I have to use cream on my face, BB cream, and blush and lipstick.

Oh, the lipstick.  There are many kinds of lipstick, matte, shiny, allday, allnight, forever and ever amen.  That last part is not true but there are a startling number of lipsticks:  midnight plum, smoked purple unending kiss (what color is that?–bruised), always apricot, snapdragon, rebel, goddess of the sea and ruby woo to name a few.

When I’m all done I really do look pretty good without my glasses on.  When I put my glasses on the effects are somewhat minimized, but still “Okay” I say to myself  “Okay”.

I admire my older sister a lot.  She is not going into “that good night” quietly or easily.  She will be out in the world fully, until the end.  She is like my Mom in that way.

I am not really like that.  Do I want to be?  Sometimes, but I think it’s too much work for something I’m not really into.

Sue and I were talking about these issues recently.  Who are we as older women?  I think we’re neither, nor, now.  That is neither male or female. We’re people.  I’m a person.

I really like this.  It is like the velveteen rabbit said, we get more real the more we’re loved or handled.

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved
off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very
shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are
Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

 

 

Black Holes

I am thinking about all these men who have been accused and in some cases stepped up and admitted that they’ve used women as their sexual playthings.  The operative word here is things.  They have an itch and women are there to scratch it.

What would cause someone to think that they can act out all their urges?  That’s a complex question.

It seems to me that someone who can do this has a big hole in their development.  Something has gone awry.  They may look grown up, they may talk grown up but something is missing.  I can’t begin to tell you what that something is, but there is a word for that:  la·cu·nae (-nē) or la·cu·nas.  An empty space or a missing part; a gap.

Visualize this—a man, seemingly put together, successful, poised, sophisticated with a large hole in the center of his chest.  Dressed, he looks normal.  But he is not.  He is an aberration.

He is a black hole.  The outer universe exists in order to satisfy his needs.

He is not looking for a relationship with a person.  He just wants to gratify his needs.  In order to do this, the man has to dehumanize the woman.  She is a thing.  She is a means to an end, that is, his gratification.

Layers upon layers of civilization cover our reptile brain but in certain individuals the layering is incomplete or nonexistent.  What is the reptile brain (our limbic system)?;  it is all id, all urge.  I want it, I take it.

If there is, and I am sure there is, evil in the world, it comes from this place.  It comes from the endless sucking into that void.  I want it all and I want it now.

Scary isn’t it?

 

 

Hunker Down

Took my dog out for a walk today and as we turned to home I smelled apples and cedar.  Aren’t those the quintessential smells of autumn?  Not cinnamon, not pumpkin latte, but wet cedar and apples.

Cedar fronds (is that what they’re called) and pine needles litter the driveway and the front walk and of course, then they make their way inside the house and up the stairs and onto my bath mat and then into my bath.   They are everywhere.  They drive me nuts.

In the deep woods and in my not so deep driveway, they muffle noise, like snow and add a hush to our surroundings.  Shhh, they seem to say, winter is coming.  Shhh, feel the cold, taste the tartness in the air, smell the end of Fall.

The squirrels and chipmunks have been picking the pine cones clean for the last month and so the cones litter my garden and paths.  They hide their stash in garden pots filled with sad and shriven flowers that I haven’t cleaned up or cut back yet.

I guess it’s hunker down season and even though I harvest nothing, I don’t can or dry or preserve anything (for I am a so-called modern woman),  I feel in my bones the coming of winter.

And when I smell that smell, I love living among the detritus of the evergreens.

Isn’t life a puzzlement.  Up and down, happy and sad, delightful and disgusting.  In the course of a few days we experience such a range.  I am lucky that I live in this country, on this little island where I am so beautifully tucked in, to be protected from the worst of it. The actual “it” of it.

If I choose to give up my morning newspaper and the evening news, I can pretend that all is well.  And it is well for those of us that live here;  tragedy rarely strikes.  Sutherland Texas, Paris France, Las Vegas, Nevada, and on and on.

The world will keep on spinning for now, and life will emerge from pine cones dropped in Fall’s winds.

But, we cannot, we must not, forswear responsibility for the violence that seems to be overtaking our communities.  If it is true that “no man is an island”, then each death diminishes you and me personally.

The world will keep on spinning and regenerating, but that has nothing to do with what I am trying to say.

There is always the LARGER picture, and then there is the human picture.  And the human picture in our country is not pretty.

We have become people who argue over the second amendment, who argue whether guns kill people or people kill people, who say it’s a mental health issue and not a gun issue.

What kind of mewling nitpicking is this?  Have we become so inured to tragedy that all we can do is argue about it’s causes?

Remember Charleton Heston”s famous line about guns “over my dead body.”  Well better yours, than the children at Sandy Hook or the parishioners in Sutherland.

We cannot control human nature, mental illness is not always apparent, and often it is not the cause of these tragedies.  We can control guns.  Let’s do it.  Let’s do it before another tragedy happens.

Not just a Simple Starch

Look what I found in my pantry:  a sad potato trying to generate baby potatoes out of it’s wrinkled desiccated self. Also, it sprouted whiskers like my cat, Larry’s.

An alien life form, not animal not human, but living, striving to regenerate.

Let’s hear it for the awesome potato.