LJNDawson

Why I Wear Black All the Time

Not that I think anyone really cares, but occasionally someone comments. And because today I am wearing a light-wine (or dark-mauve) colored dress…

I used to think it was because I had little kids and I would get their Nutella-smeared fingerprints all over my clothes. These kids are now 19 and 14. I used to think it was because I lived in an urban area and had city grit floating around rubbing itself into my clothes. Now I live on Staten Island on a tree-lined block in an old Victorian house, and drive to work every day. I used to think it was because I had no time to coordinate outfits and black was the quickest way to get dressed in the morning. Now I have to face the truth.

I spill food all over myself.

Bustling

In a busy house, weekends are largely about Getting Ready For the Week. The interminable laundry. The changing of the bunny cage. Dog-grooming. And, lately, cooking and putting up food.

When I was married, the food was my responsibility. Eventually I worked out a system whereby I made five meals on a Saturday night, and put them up in plastic containers. I posted a spreadsheet on the refrigerator – this main course, with this vegetable (or two), and this starch. It worked, mostly, unless I left “salad” open to interpretation.

Bernardo is a fantastic cook. For a while we theorized that he would cook during the week, and I would do it on the weekends; but our weekends are so jammed with chores, kid-ferrying, and sudden decisions to go skiing or to the beach. This weekend we instituted a new plan – I would do stews and casseroles and things (my forte anyway) and freeze them for weeknight consumption. And Bernardo would do the weekend cooking – which may or may not require prep, but he is better at that sort of thing than I am. As of Sunday night, it’s working – over the weekend I made a veal curry and a chili, and for lunches I made a curried celeriac soup. Bernardo already has some baked ziti in the freezer, as well as some sauce for ravioli, so I think that takes us through Friday.

I am coming down with a cold today, so after a long nap I simply puttered. (Laundry is good for that – reorganizing closets and drawers, fussing over clothing.) Bernardo moved some of the furniture in the bedroom so my vanity is under a good strong light. And I recovered the bench, which was this awful zebra print. Now it’s pretty.

As Bernardo made dinner (a delicious sausage bolognese with whole-wheat pasta), we talked about What’s Next. Venetian plaster for the living room walls, and a new carpet. New wallpaper for the stairway, and new carpet. Painting the sunroom and the kitchen (yellow and peach, respectively).

All of which is much easier than what we have just finished doing – landscaping the backyard, putting in the shed and the pool and the patio, installing French drains and a new basement floor. Things are coming along.

Chocolate Lab

I broke my writing-every-day resolution a second time – by getting violently ill in Brussels on Saturday, and thus spending the one day I had to roam around the city actually lying flat-out knackered in my bed, only peeking up to rid myself of bodily fluids or to check Twitter. I was too ill to even watch re-runs of Sherlock. I am never too ill to watch re-runs of Sherlock (“I could cut myself on those cheekbones.” Oh, yes, please.)

The hotel kindly sent me up four pieces of dry toast and two liters of ice-cold mineral water, not-so-kindly charging me nineteen Euro for the delivery. But the toast was very helpful, and I was still clutching two pieces of it like talismans as I boarded the plane on Sunday morning to come back home. (“No, I do not want to check my toast. I need my toast.“) We promptly sat on the tarmac for two hours while Belgium figured out how to deal with snow, and I finished sleeping – which was unfortunate because there was an eight-hour flight ahead.

During which I watched re-runs of Sherlock, so I was obviously feeling better. I also started and finished Going Clear, which was fascinating and very reminiscent of the Readers Digest and Newsweek articles about cults that I devoured in the 1970s. I arrived home with a bag of chocolates in hand, and Bernardo made us an early dinner, because it was obvious I was going to crash at around 8:30.

Which I did.

I was awakened, however, early this morning to the sounds of Bernardo scolding Mollydog. Then he came and got me. ”Molly ate the chocolate.”

Yes, the only redeeming thing (besides the good work that got done) about this trip was laid to waste all over the living room floor…and the kitchen floor…and the basement floor…and in various puddles in the backyard as the morning went on. A ninety-pound black Labrador hopped up on caffeine and sugar is not something anyone should have to endure, least of all the Labrador.

Molly is fortunate that she is such a big dog, and that the chocolate was milk chocolate – her toxin level was not that high, relatively. We fed her rice and lots of water and she got herself back together in a few hours.

Somewhere in all of this, Obama got inaugurated again. It sounded wonderful.

Already broken

I didn’t write yesterday. I am consumed with this online course I’m taking to reduce our auto insurance – it’s a safety course that is simultaneously horrifying (both in length and content) and educational.

I didn’t start driving until I was 40 or so. Weirdly, I’d had my license the whole time – I took driver’s ed in high school but got into a fender-bender the week after I got my license. My father insisted I needed more practice, but neither he nor I had the time to give over for it. I just kept renewing my license, and when I moved to New York, I wasn’t required to re-take the test.

I did take some driving lessons, and practiced assiduously with Bernardo, until I was able to drive from Brooklyn to Delaware to visit my mother. Now I drive daily – not just because I live on Staten Island, but because I work 45 minutes away by toll roads.

I didn’t really need to know how to drive until relatively recently – living first in Manhattan and then in Brooklyn, public transportation is all too available. Staten Island is a different story altogether. I love my car – though I’m getting a hybrid next time – but even more, I love what it does for me.

Back to the course. I will do a couple of posts from Brussels to make up.

Decisions

My father’s side of the family is from the Southwest by way of Canada by way of who knows, but ultimately Ulster and Scotland. My father’s mom was a McCurdy (so apparently I can wear Stewart tartan? Though I don’t generally do plaids). Presbyterians all the way down (until me).

At any rate, my grandmother was a very talented singer and had a music scholarship; she was a talented painter as well. But she didn’t go to conservatory; her mother was sick, and as the girl in the family, the caregiving fell to her. Then she got married to my grandfather, and Great-Grandma lived with them and stubbornly didn’t die and didn’t get any better.

They were poor. My grandfather was an airplane mechanic, but it was the Depression in Oklahoma City. And shortly after their marriage (we try not to ask too many questions about dates) my grandmother was pregnant with my father.

This was at the time when they knocked women out for labor and delivery. When my grandmother woke up, she not only had a new baby, she’d had a hysterectomy. The doctor, in all his compassion, didn’t charge her for that. Then again, she hadn’t asked.

So my father was an only child. And while it was probably for the best economically, it made for a very bizarre household dynamic – my father shared a room with his always-about-to-die-but-never-quite-getting-there grandmother. My grandfather got sent to war – where his fortunes improved, but my dad grew up lonely. After her mother finally did die, Grandma had to go to work as a waitress. Dad was a latchkey kid…in the 1940s, before the term had been invented. As he grew up, he showed an aptitude for engineering – when he changed his mind and went into theology (and then to Harvard Divinity School on a massive scholarship), his father was apoplectic.

If there had been another child, the load of family expectations could have been shared. My father was traumatized by his relationship with his parents (his mother was very needy, as one might imagine – the woman had never had control over any aspect of her life). He moved as far away from them as he could get, and almost never went back to Oklahoma ever again. When they came to visit us (and he couldn’t refuse them – we were their only grandchildren), he spent a lot of time outside.

If a woman had been able to make her own decisions, a lot of misery would have been spared. Perhaps there would have been different misery – sometimes avoiding the frying pan of one fate leads you into the fire of another – but at least the integrity of a choice would carry some weight. People are better at living with consequences they have brought on themselves rather than living with consequences that are inflicted on them.

Five decades after my dad’s latchkey years, I had my own family, of my own choice. I worked 9-5 during the week; on the weekends I would be in the kitchen cooking up a storm, putting up meals for the week. And I listened to old radio shows being rebroadcast on public stations (this was before streaming audio on the internet) – Jack Benny, Gracie Allen. I knew that all those years ago, my grandmother had done the same. As I cooked and cooked, I dwelt with her.