Weekly Wisdom from Mr. Trollope

There are both men and women to whom even the delays and disappointments of love are charming, even when they exist to the detriment of hope.

Consumed

     It's no secret, and possibly a source of pride, that I like food--a lot.  In New York, at home, I cook and bake, enjoying especially the preparation of my meals. Taking the time to choose a recipe, shopping for the ingredients, spending an afternoon cutting and chopping, measuring; the ritual and the food make up a large part of my life in Brooklyn.  I certainly spend more time with food in my apartment than I do sleeping or watching Bravo (the sleeping part bad, Bravo, a little less bad), or talking on the phone.
Arriving in Denver just before Rosh Hashanah, I found myself grieving for my grandfather with a longing for the food of that holiday--the brisket, tzimmes, kugel, honey cake.  There's nothing new about the idea that food plays a great role in our concept of family and history, but I never felt it like I did this September.  I made those foods all for the first time, and ate and cried, each bite a reminder of Herbert and the family gathering we both were absent from.  Aunt Judy would pack up leftovers that would go straight into his overflowing refrigerator and freezer, staying, possibly, too long. I froze my leftovers too, like a memory.
     I missed a lot while in the West--grandparents, holidays, cats, friends, home, my kitchen.  I often will cook quite frequently for the people I work with, contributing to a sense of home by making things to share with thoughtfulness.  An offering of a part of my self that's important to me, a welcoming. But I only made one more meal worth sharing in Denver ( curried butternut squash soup with creme fraiche and pumpkin seeds) but my heart just wasn't in it. So I started to eat out. All the time. There's a truly excellent dining scene here and I was hungry-- but for something more than food. Comfort, passion, adventure.  It may be that the drama of human feeding in Dracula made me ravenous; its characters hunger for food but also for life, sex, pain, faith, bodies, souls. And, well, I'm a suggestible person.  I sought it out on the streets of Denver when I couldn't create it in my own (transitory) home.  Feasts aren't always celebratory-- they can be mournful too. Endless courses of everything we want, everything we have, all we despise, all we lack, everything that is, and all we imagine could be.  And I had a brief taste too for that fulfillment that food replaces, something I think I like the taste of better than anything in the world, only it's not always as readily available as that other sustenance pouring out of sidewalks and shopping complexes.  Or from Fresh Direct, where food is delivered like a gift to your home, cheese and fruit all bearing a sticker with your name on it.  There will be such a gift awaiting my arrival in New York, the food of home at home, nourishment removed slightly from drama, my appetite changing and ever adapting.  

Weekly Wisdom from Mr. Trollope

The world is harder to women than to men; a woman loses much by the chance of adverse circumstances, a man only loses by his own misconduct.

"Then Have Much Breakfast," (or: Bram Stoker's Hungry)

I've been feeding on Vampire literature these days, sucking up as much information as I can before heading off to a city one mile closer to the sun than the rest of the country--rough terrain for the undead.  I was made particularly happy as I began to read Stoker's novel, to discover that his characters like to eat just as much as I do; they eat constantly, with relish, and with great detail.  When Jonathan Harker's diary entries begin, he remarks several times that he must get the recipes for the strange and delicious meals he encounters on his way to Transylvania, in order that Mina may recreate them for him when they are married.  Diaries and recipes--records used to clarify history, formulas for memory--begin a novel wherein the marking of time is essential for the survival of its characters, as is the food humans and vampires alike seek--different in type but no different in necessity.  I, too, consume both time and food, steadily tracking the days in meals, and learning about a not so distant past, where The New Woman and the Victorian ideal would meet in the character of Mina.  I'm a little like a Vampire, drinking in the life of another woman, creating her as my own, undead in her own way, an embodiment of life.

There is such passion in consumption--eating, drinking, methodically recording life's daily events, collecting memories and recipes.  And all these passions result in creation--of a meal, a new being, a novel, a character.

I'm cooking now, in more ways than one, and I cannot wait to set the table . . .

Grandparents

Weekly Wisdom from Mr. Trollope

Her face was her fortune, and her fortune she knew was deteriorating from day to day

love letters

The CD I was listening to as I drove away from the lovely little cottage that was my home for the past two weeks on Cape Cod was comprised entirely of love songs, and the note inside the CD said that the songs were chosen to represent the power that love holds over us and the way in which we experience the passing of time when we're in love.  My heart's been swimming a bit the past few days, a whirlpool of adored fragments; the wood in the Cape Playhouse, the yellowing posters on its walls, documented by a man who cares that it be remembered who worked there, and that he stood on the same stage as they; Julie Harris, 85 years old, standing in the green room to shake our hands after being in our audience; the ocean, and a shell handed to me by a new friend; the joy of making people laugh, and of agreeing to fall in love night after night after night.  On the beach, a place where I spent a lot of time with my Grandfather, and back in my home, where the books he gave me sit on shelves, I think about him who died just three weeks ago, who never said the words "I love you" to me, but who was certainly a man who loved--women, books, paper, saving a dime, his grandkids.  I loved him like I love stories, memories, theatres--things, places where you can, as the great Paul Simon says, "make every lover the love of your life."  Where a scrap of paper is romantic, and the hidden story behind a tube of lipstick, or a pen stain inside the pocket of a shirt, sends your imagination spinning.  There's a lot I don't know about my Grandfather, so I write my ideas of him in my mind, a love letter to family, to ancestry, history and future.  In The 39 Steps, Richard Hannay is consistently told he has no heart, that he has no one to love, that he has no one to come home to.  And yet, he finds little whispers of love all around him; he wants and is wanted but he just can't stop running long enough to claim it.  Until he does.  And I do all the time.

Weekly Wisdom from Mr. Trollope

I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover's mind if she knew the whole of it.

Present Outlines, Effect Proposed

      So said a series of turn of the century "before and afters," photos of the land that was to be Central Park, and drawings of what that would look like, currently on display at The Morgan Library.  They were part of an exhibit called Romantic Gardens, about the effect of romanticism on landscape design.  The romantic ethos moved away from the monarchical symmetry of gardens forced into submission by man and toward a natural liberalism that highlighted nature's inherent beauty.   I had visited the library this time as a guest of my Grandfather to see Magna Carta, the little document temporarily and unexpectedly estranged from home.  I saw the paper, was surprised by how tiny such an important thing could be, and then quickly ran away from Herbert, who was, as usual, attracting lots of attention.  I wandered past Mr. Morgan's study and walked by the cafe.  To my left was a little room housing an exhibit called Defining Beauty.  Naturally, I opened the door and walked in.  Albrecht Durer's drawings lined the walls, and a book lay open displaying human figures, their bodies marked and measured in minute detail.  This book, On Human Proportion, is Durer's study of the human form--more importantly, human forms.  The exhibit quotes him as saying that in his quest for beauty in art, he took an arm from one body, a breast from another, toes from yet another--that beauty could not be found singularly, it required variation, and I suppose, collaboration.  It's a lovely idea this artist had--no muse, just musing on everything he saw, finding beauty in everyone and everything and, using art, bringing them together to reflect humanity.  I kept these thoughts in my mind as I walked by the drawings, studying the forms, and noticing the prejudices in myself toward the bodies I observed, my instinct to adapt to what is culturally popular in terms of body aesthetics.  Durer's vision is so wholesome, so inclusive.  His vision encompasses the reasons why we find a child's scribblings wonderful, choose a home cooked meal over haute cuisine, desire the person we love over an image in a magazine--not perfectly formed, but perfectly intended.  Durer wrote this as an accompaniment to a work of art:
  "Please let it be as it is. No one could improve it because it was done artistically and with care. Those who see it and who understand such matters will tell you so." 
     He accepts the ambiguity of individuality, strives for precision and care within that acceptance, and finds harmony.  He should have written a book for teenage girls.  I thought about the time I've been spending with a personal trainer, time initially set aside to propose an effect on the present outlines, but time that has instead, become about lifting fifteen more pounds than I could three weeks earlier, impressing myself with my own strength--things of my body but not really about it: defining beauty in individuality, power, flaw, artistry; cultivating gardens not to diminish what's already growing, but to nurture their fullest potential.  
     

Happy Birthday, Mr. Trollope!

An author can hardly hope to be popular unless he can use popular language ... But all this must be learned and acquired, not while he is writing ... but long before. His language must come from him as music comes from the rapid touch of the great performer's fingers.

Weekly Wisdom from Mr. Trollope

There are some women who have a special gift of hiding their dislikings from the objects of them, when occasion requires. And as they do so, their faces will overcome their hearts, and their emnity will give way to smiles. They become almost friendly because they look friendly.

The Stars Fell

on me in Alabama. I lived my little drama, and stars fell on Alabama that night. I saw those stars tumbling down over vast areas of open space, littering the sky above the lights from the theatre.  I watched them on my way back from the ocean, full from ice cream, and peanuts, and adventure.  I kept track of them as I drove to Birmingham late one night listening to the same country music over and over again.  They led me to Seale, AL after a luminous article in the NYT instructed me to go to there.  They were scattered about the porch where Zelda and Scott might have held hands years ago.  I wanted to be the Camellia in the heart of Dixie, I really did.  And in some parallel universe I might be or might have been.  There is no way to better respond to flattery from a gentleman than with a southern lilt.  I have never been complemented so many times in a grocery store as I was in Publix--without fail, every time I went.  I have never eaten so many delicious things, or even wanted to eat so many delicious things (impossible!, you may think, but no, no).  I have never been so homesick.
     I have thought about the women in my life who are from the South, thought about what attracts me to them, and how their Southerness is a part of that attraction--and thought that really, to be from the South is not something I can fully try on.  I can wear my predilection for it as a scarf, a handbag, a pair of high heels: just not the entire ensemble.  I'm sorry that's the case--it's not like me to be a wanna-be (or when I want to be, I become).  I will always have Catherine Simms, and my Southern sub-genre of chick lit (Waltzing at the Piggly Wiggly anyone?) but I give in--I'm not a Southern belle.  A Camellia I am not.  A New York Rose, that's me, thorns and all.