I forgot the rosemary yesterday when we walked over to the grocery store and picked up a leg of lamb. My bad. So I drove over early to pick some up. Also my bad.
How could I forget that my grocer stocks their produce aisles from 8:00 to 9:30?
The place looked like it might the day before a blizzard. Ravaged. Marked by emptiness.
There was no rosemary. Not a single stinking sprig. No lemons. No green beans.
Who thinks that’s a good business model? (And who am I to expect their business model to conform to my need?)
I next headed down Route 9 to another grocery store to fill the gaps in my list, which you need to understand is decidedly not my style. In fact, it is so not my style that when I listen to a friend, probably “a shopper” but not necessarily, describe going to multiple shops to get what they were looking for, it’s as if I’m listening to someone from another planet. I’d rather wear something that doesn’t fit. Or go without.
See: my five-year-old bathing suit.
I am already annoyed, but it just so happens I’m wearing socks like slide. You know the ones — every twenty or thirty steps or so you need to reach down and tug them up or you’ll soon find a naked heel meeting the inside of your shoe.
The question could be: why do some socks do this? But heading down the long dairy aisle for vanilla ice cream and bending to tug, I realized the question could just as easily be: why don’t ALL socks do this?
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles rosemary grows in freaking HEDGES. I can’t help but look back and find a couple of pics.
Happy Easter to anyone who celebrates! I’m off to marinate my lamb in rosemary, parsley, oregano, thyme, lemon, olive oil, and tons of garlic.
So my car fob went missing a while back, possibly as long ago as our trip to the Berkshires in early February. I checked every pocket. I looked in bowls and baskets. K took down the suitcase from the birthday trip and I checked its every pocket. No luck.
This was such a sustained case of “Where’s My?” that I had a chance to develop a new search trick. Get this, rather than looking in every zippered or unzippered section of every purse you might have used recently, carry all your bags out to the car in a fistful and see if the door unlocks. A short cut!
I regularly use: two hobo dog-walking bags (that I made), a smaller zippered pouch (that my mother-in-law made), a beautiful new voluminous bag that Ginny gave me recently. I occasionally use two other small-ish shoulder bags.
Even if my trick arose out of a pathetic lifelong flaw and will only work with car fobs, I’m very proud of it.
The loss didn’t hamper my style for two reasons. One — I hardy go anyway these days. Two — I could borrow my husband’s. However, given my predilection for losing things, using my husband’s fob came with an unspoken but shared concern that I would eventually misplace it too. Then we’d be out some bucks.
So not ideal.
Anyway, this morning five seconds after I announced with a weary sigh that I didn’t think I was gonna find my fob — ever — I found my fob.
It was in one of my BlueQ zippered pouches. I use these funky little pouches when I travel for things like dental floss, thread nippers, and hair clips. This practice was necessitated years back when I started using a messenger bag that one of the boys left behind, a big roomy thing with no inner divisions (clearly not designed by a woman).
Is she still taking about bags?
It’s a shame you can’t fake the belief that a misplaced item is not coming back. Otherwise, I’d have feigned my fatigue and said it’s gone with breathy resignation five weeks ago!
PS. I’m not wringing my hands over this. It’s kinda funny, really. I am still thinking about a post of Grace’s from 12/28/2014, linked to her most recent post. She talked about her beloved dog, Tay, who recently passed, and how she was a little immune to shaming words, and to praise as well. How healthy is that? I was inspired.
Another harder reflection was to note the date, see my absence from the long line of comments, and to wonder what life-sucking drama was playing out in Salem then. My sister was born on the 27th of December, so chances are I made the effort to see her on that day, but rarely a year went by without her making a stink about being neglected around her birthday. It’s a time of year I’ve historically dreaded even as I tried to prevent her lonely victimhood with generous gifts. I am going to resist the temptation to pull out a journal and see the particulars.
This year on my birthday: 66. This year four days after my birthday: my mother will be gone for 27. It’s easy to keep track of her absence because she died a month before my younger son was born. I will always know how old he is.
Come a week in March, both boys will roll round one year older. THAT same week will mark my sister being gone four years.
The confluence of dates is not my doing. My mother died four days after my birthday and my sister died on one of my son’s birthdays.
Noticing is inescapable, in other words.
And it’s not morbid as it turns out. Listening to a conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert while walking Finn this morning opened up some pockets of gladness or recognition or something. They talked about grief. How it’s a gift. Or rather, how still being alive is a gift. It’s more nuanced than that though, given how grief acts as a vessel for remembrance, celebration.
Both of them experienced devastating losses early. Cooper’s father died of heart disease when he was ten and then eleven years later his brother jumped off a building, killing himself (while their mother watched). Colbert also lost his father at age ten, but in an accident. That accident also claimed the lives of two of his brothers. Their conversation is really worth a listen.
I was born just after sunset in a hospital that no longer exists. Here’s a haiku I wrote last week.
Cooper is documenting cleaning out his mother’s apartment. She died in 2019 and apparently she left notes for him everywhere. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while.
Looking at this doll without a note, how would D know that I dyed the wool, cotton strips, and linen myself? Or that I knit the legs in the waiting room of Children’s Hospital while a surgeon put pins in his arm, all the while praying for his bones to knit (get it?) and heal. Or that the striped top came from a shirt I wore frequently when he was little, the collar from a cuff of a sweater of his dad’s?
PS it didn’t occur to me until after posting this that year zero for me would’ve been sixty-seven years ago. But the syllables don’t work for the haiku form!
Temps plummeting here so I made Finn a coat. It’s already been modified since its debut.
There’s a polar fleece underlayer and a top layer of gorgeous Irish wool. I know, I know. High quality imported wool for the dog?
Well, yes and why not? It’s been sitting in a bin for twenty-plus years. I think my mother gave it to me. Or it was hers and ended up with me. Since this picture was taken, I revamped the neck edge and moved the straps forward. Not ideal but it will work for the next walk in 7 degrees. Going to -10 overnight. Whew!
We went to Colorado last week. Saw the boys. We enjoyed it, our first gathering in EIGHTEEN MONTHS. One evening at the XGames in Aspen was a bit of a scene and memorable, other nights in front of a fire more relaxed (with YouTube offering much better viewing of the boarding events). C had a GoPro camera strapped to his chest on their days on the slopes, so even though I wasn’t skiing, I was treated to video of their descents.
I’m proud to say that we shopped the first day for what seemed like a huge amount of food, but we very nearly consumed it all. Except for the acorn squash. For some reason, on no night did I feel like stuffed acorn squash. I brought them home in my suitcase!
Our flights out of Aspen were cancelled because of a localized storm, so we ended up driving to Denver. Everyone made it home safe and sound. And no, the passes through Loveland and Breckenridge were not the white-knuckling, guard-rail-free nightmares I was anticipating.
I will never not be amazed by flying. That’s one of the Great Lakes above. K and I got four upgrades to first class. Sigh. The end of an era, since his Global Services status is due to expire. He may try to squeeze a couple of trips to China in before he retires, but given the ferocity of their Covid outbreak, it’s a problematic idea.
You used to have to quarantine upon arrival in China for seven to fourteen days, depending. Even if you quarantined in one city, say Beijing, you’d have to quarantine all over again if you traveled elsewhere, say Shanghai. They’ve dropped those requirements.
It is so odd how China went from imposing the most draconian disease management protocols to having none at all. In our country, we seem to be suffering from a similar lack of will — or is it delusion? Covid is no longer an emergency? Oh really? Is that why 2,000 to 4,000 Americans are dying EVERY WEEK, not to mention the drastic effects of Long Covid beginning to be documented to a horrifying degree?
Two men behind me on the flight home coughed the entire trip.
Synchronicity is a gateway to faith and if not faith, then at least to the recognition that the world is more mysterious than we know, and isn’t that recognition a lot like faith?
Synchronicity can show up as a haunting or a miracle. Sometimes it’s funny. It’s always worthy of attention.
I’ve had three synchronous moments lately — one a haunting, one a sly joke, and one a gracious note from the dead (which of course is not the same as a haunting).
Today, I’ll relate the haunting. It’s about my sister. Of course it’s about my sister.
For our holiday meal, rather than clean up a half-finished jigsaw puzzle, we brought in a small oak table from the garage. This table has history. It was where my family sat and ate dinner for years — on Glen Terrace, Cypress Drive, Glory Drive, and Whitman Road. After my mother remarried, she brought it south with her to Lighthouse Point and then back north to Essex.
In the early years, my parents occupied either end. Sometimes the table was up against a wall, sometimes centered in a dining space. Either way, my sister sat on one of the long sides while my brother and I occupied the side opposite. I think it was probably this seating arrangement that inspired Noreen to learn how to pinch with her toes. Don’t laugh! She could really inflict some pain.
It’s also where my father used humor to drive home the difference between can I and may I. If you were to say, for instance, can I have the ketchup, he’d deadpan with yes you can or I don’t know, can you, and keep eating. He managed to make it funny. And we learned.
After my mother died, the table went to my sister. When my sister died, it came to me.
I didn’t think I was sentimental about the table until I was scraping off mold and cleaning the disgusting, nearly black gunk from between its center seams. Both gross. To look at the burns and stains scattered on its surface was to see my sister’s dysfunction made plain. Again. I found myself wondering what, exactly, prevented her from performing the simple tasks that make up a life. Was it so hard to wipe the table clean once in a while or slip a plate under a plant? For her, yes it was too much.
Or was it? Maybe it was just what she told herself. With Noreen it was impossible to tell and in the end, I realized it didn’t matter. The result was the same. A disordered life. A stained, ruined table.
Anyway, I managed to get a sliver. The sliver was almost impossible to see and took a magnifying glass and some real wrangling to remove. There were moments I thought I imagined it. This is when I said, Hello Noreen. The sliver might’ve been a bristle from a toothbrush I used to clean the tarry seams or it might’ve been a piece of the table itself.
Either way, my pinky got infected. It hurt. It turned bright red. For days, even after the splinter was out, I had to apply hot compresses, soak it in salty water and hydrogen peroxide and once, use a sterilized pin to poke out a blob of puss.
Not to belabor the point, but this is a pretty apt metaphor for being in relationship with my sister. Working hard to clean up one of her messes, a job I never signed up for, by the way, only to get shafted. Having to deal with the emotional wreckage after a visit for days. And even that hallucinatory quality — is this real or am I making it up — speaks to how convincing she could be with her narratives of blame. Maybe I was, in fact, a complete shit. Maybe I wickedly shortchanged her.
That inner dialogue occurred even as I knew that nothing was ever gonna be enough for my sister and even though I knew that withholding was a critical form of self-protection. She was forceful. She pinched me under the table with her toes.
So that’s the haunting. I’ll save the other two incidents for the next post. This is long enough.
By the way, in my sister’s papers I found reports from elementary school. Elementary school! One was a report about Alaska, another about bats. Around Halloween this year, I made a spooky paper collage and then digitally double-exposed it with the cover of her bat report. That’s one version, above. Another version, sans bats, is below.
