Month: December 2008

– Freaks, inside or out

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In The Family Stone, a movie that Jimmy and I saw together and (dis)liked differently, the Luke Wilson character exhorts the straight-laced Sarah Jessica Parker character to fly her “freak flag.” Yeah, I loved that. I also cried when the Diane Keaton character died.

In praise of freaks of all kinds (and aren’t you, whether secretly or openly, one too?), I offer a brief list of some 2008 favorites.

Book: No One Belongs Here More than You, Miranda July.

Musical artist: Ida Maria.

Essay: “Mine Is Longer than Yours,” Michael Kinsley, New Yorker, April 7, 2008.

Sitcom: The Office. (I almost picked 30 Rock, but there have been fewer surprises there this season.)

Blog written by someone I don’t know: David Byrne Journal.

Tears of joy and relief: Reading this transcript, while watching a video of the speech, on the morning after.

Clothing: Anthropologie.

Siblings: my four.  All strange, in their own ways.

That’ll have to do.

—-

p.s. Thanks to my always surprising friend James, who got me to do this.  And to Lydia, who heeded the call first and thereby inspired me.

– Body’s report card

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It’s on the kitchen counter, having arrived in the mail a day or two ago: a letter from the Joslin Diabetes Center with a full, quantitative report on what’s going on in my blood cells and, by extension, me.  I’m not ready to open it.

report2

Last week I saw my diabetes specialist. At one time, when I was new to diabetes and full of zeal, my performance — at monitoring, eating, record-keeping, sweets-avoiding, exercising, and controlling — was excellent. Sometimes, when Dr. A. introduced me to a med student on rotation, he would say, “This is my best patient.” Or even, “Here’s my A student.” In my late 20s at the time, that always struck me as paternalistic, if not affectionate, but still flattering. In the last couple of years, however, my body’s quarterly report card shows a more erratic performance. Occasionally, those numbers look great. More often than not, they look… merely adequate. Last week, as we looked over the records that I keep daily on my blood sugar, Dr. A. raised his eyes over the top of the paper and  asked me, in so many words, why I couldn’t do better. When I shrugged and smiled weakly, he caught my glance and then tapped the side of his head (home of the brain) as if to say, “You can do it. And because you’re not doing it, it must be your attitude.” Continue reading →

– Writing in bed

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I am reclining with the heating pad under my shoulder. It’s only 7 o’clock in the evening. With me is also Everyman, which I am finishing, and my iBook.

Jimmy walks in and says to me, “You know, a lot of writers wrote in bed.”

“Really?” I ask, which does not express doubt, but is just the way I say: “Tell me more.”

He says that Proust did. Capote did.

“Why?” I wonder.

He tells me that Proust was sick. Capote just preferred it.

Not for me, I say, or something like that.  And, yet, here I am, writing in bed, and doubting that I will do it again.

– Christmas ghosts

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A couple of weeks ago I hurt my neck or my shoulder — “the C6 region,” according to the chiropractor whom I started seeing out of desperation yet now am quite attached to — and it’s been hard to get into the anticipatory rituals that make a holiday interesting and attractive. When I was a child, my mother would bake cookies for gifts, and this would start weeks in advance. The house always smelled like almonds and butter and oven heat. It was fun to try to guess where she hid the cookies, and a treat to be allotted a few.

I have done no baking, no Christmas cooking.

Ornament, c. 1965

Ornament, c. 1965

Tonight for our Christmas Eve dinner we had pizza rolls, noodle soup, and squash soup, plus glasses of milk. Deck the halls. I had said to Jimmy, when we went out earlier at 5pm for a last-minute errand, “I wonder what the Hales are doing tonight?” Those are my cousins, with whom I grew up, and, for perhaps the first 36 or 37 years of my life, we spent every Christmas Eve together. Whether we gathered at our cousins’ house across the street or at ours, the basic meal was always the same: deviled eggs with a bit of paprika, Swedish meatballs, scalloped potatoes, pickled herring for the old aunts, ham, Uncle Bob’s baked beans, green salad, and in the early days a gelatin salad. Some years a daring cook would experiment and bring a new vegetable dish; sometimes there was lasagna. There was always plenty; my mother and her cousin Joyce believed there had to be a lot, “because men like to eat.” While they were right, I noticed that the women liked to eat, too. Continue reading →

– Thumb splits

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Last week I was at the Chestnut Hill post office, and on the female clerk I noticed the tell-tale sign: colorful bandaids wrapped tightly around the tips of a few of her digits.

I winced in sympathy. “Oh, finger splits?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said and seemed to groan. “They’re terrible. And always this time of year.”

“I know. They kill.”

“They really do,” she replied. “Especially the deep ones. They don’t seem big enough to cause that much pain, but they do.” Meanwhile, her hands kept moving, moving, moving. It’s the dryness of the winter air and the constant activity of our hands that do us in.

“Try Super Glue,” I said.

“Uh, I don’t know about that. A girlfriend said the same thing, but, uh, I dunno.” As she talked, she remained in motion: shifting packages, stamping them, sorting bills and coins.

skincrackcare“Well, there’s a skin glue that works, from 3M. It’s almost as strong as Super Glue. I’ve tried it.”

“Okay,” she said.  “Okay. Thanks!”

Behind the long counter, the clerk stood in her spot, her busy arms like the hands of a clock and she the center of a circle. Perhaps she is resolved to keep suffering, as we all are. I had a feeling, as I walked away, that she would stick with bandaids.

– Onions are vegetables.

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This post is dedicated to my brother, Brian, who said recently that he’s trying to eat “more cooked vegetables.” His resolution I find charming; it’s so much more idiosyncratic than one of the standard <yawn> resolutions, like trying to lose weight or save money.  A couple of years ago, on New Year’s Day, I resolved to stop using parentheticals in my writing. (I’m addicted to them.) I succeeded perfectly for one month, as most people do. Still, I keep trying.

Last night for dinner I made American chop suey, a staple of childhood and, really, just about one of the best New England comfort dishes we’ve got going. I realized, as threw it together (because it is one of those kinds of dishes), that it’s a painless way to get your cooked vegetables, because, except for the tomatoes, they are all verily disguised.  Aside from the canned tomatoes, there are two others: bell pepper and onion. Yes, onions are vegetables, too.

It’s cheap; it’s good; and it’s easy to remember the recipe, because everything is in quantities of one: 1 pound of this, 1 can of that, and so on.  However, American chop suey (also called ghoulash in the Midwest and chili-mac on public school cafeteria menus) is not photogenic.  Here’s the recipe, without photographic illustration, passed down to me by my mother and revised by me: Continue reading →

– Census: seven bags

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In response to my School Bag Meme, Emily, Rosemary, James, Dr. Poppy, Jan, and Alex posted the contents of the bags they carry to and fro work every day.  (Thank you, friends and sis!) Add their contents to mine, and you get this wordle — kind of a census of the things we seven carry.

wordle1

I constrained wordle to compile the top 75 words, so some of the more idiosyncratic items dropped out. Still, fascinating the nouns and modifiers that remained. Compartment. Green. Dry. Always. Paris. Gum. Hair. Never. Bottle. Wireless. Papers. And Jan’s lovely rosary, up in the top left corner, near the essential chapstick.

– Weather whipsaw

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Winter easing its grip on Northeast – The Boston Globe

Analyzing four decades of winter climate data, beginning in 1965, University of New Hampshire scientists found that regional temperatures are rising at a rate of 0.8 degrees per decade. Meanwhile, the number of days with snow on the ground is decreasing at the rate of 3.6 days per decade, the study found.

Jane and snow, Leicester, MA. 1975.

Jane and snow, Leicester, MA. 1975.

This explains why, a few years ago, I never got my backyard ice rink to freeze, and why there is no longer that profuse snow I recall from childhood, when it seemed possible, every winter, to help my father build a roomy igloo in the piles of snow left by the plows and then play in that igloo for days and days.

UPDATE (Dec 22): Although one or two storms do not a trend make, we are suddenly BLANKETED by snow here in Boston, after a snowfall on Friday the 19th and another on Sunday the 21st. And yesterday Harrison was out there with the girls, digging a fort into the piles left by the plows.