Author: jelizabeth

– 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.

– Lunch love notes

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I made the school lunches today.  The food was so-so (sandwich, Cheez-Its®, apple), but I also added a treat: little notes.

lunch-note

My mother occasionally packed one of these in my sack lunch when I was in elementary school. Finding the note, which I kept to myself, made the afternoon at school glow.

– The party’s over

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The semester has ended.

Well, almost.

The part of the semester that involves students has ended. I’m still sitting at my desk, calculating grades. The tally must be done — it’s part of the job — but this task is pretty dry.

There’s always a letdown at this point, when the real reasons for late nights, bags stuffed with paper, sharpened pencils, furrowed brows, last-minute prep, beautiful handouts, and teacher’s sighs pack up and go home.

Students.  I miss them when they go, even just for winter break.

In the past few days, since a culminating evening of student presentations in one course I teach in, I find myself wanting to turn to my colleagues (other staff on the same course) and sing to them a random song that my sister Sally and I used to sing to each other on occasion and at random.  Here’s how I (mis)recall the lyrics, and what I would sing: “The party’s over… take off your makeup… wake up, my friend…” The sound and the words linger on what has passed and will never happen, in just this way, again.

It’s a Nat King Cole song, yet Sally and I probably listened to the Johnny Mathis version on our parents’ phonograph player.

I can’t find a video of a live performance by either NKC or JM, but there’s a good one by Shirley Bassey.  Check out the arm flutters when she sings, “The candles flicker and dim.”

– Sunken treasure?

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Where was the scrap of paper on which I had written down the date and time for a long overdue haircut? I remembered inserting that scrap between some others I’ve accumulated in my school bag.

I couldn’t find it.  I took my wallet, notebook, pencil case, and glucose monitor kit out of my bag, and I peered into the morass.  I stirred the papers and other items resting on the bottom. The scrap I had in mind did not float up.

I dumped out the bag onto the floor in the hall. Although I didn’t find what I was looking for, I did find all this: the evidence of an autumn that has flown by.

the things she carried, 12.9.2008

the things she carried, 12.9.2008

Yes, I did style the pile a bit to make the contents distinctly visible and composed.

Here’s the list.  Make of it what you will.

  • notes for a handout on presentations for 2.009, a class
  • grocery store receipt, dated 11.19.08, amount due $149.36
  • hair clip (what Emily calls a “chip clip” for hair)
  • wrinkled, yet clean, tissue
  • dollar
  • coins
  • $10 off coupon to DSW, where I’ve gone twice to search for perfect black boots and failed
  • feedback from Grace’s fall parent/teacher conference, dated 11.12.08 (favorite phrase in it: “pours an abundance of energy”)
  • letter to me on Joslin Clinic stationery
  • receipt from ATM at MIT, dated 10.07.08, in amount of $50
  • green Sharpie
  • white-coated paperclip
  • bandaid (I usually carry enough to share.)
  • Neutrogena chapstick (“The best,” say I.)
  • mustard packet from the snack/sandwich bar at school (an extra from the occasional ham & Swiss sandwich I buy there)
  • scraps of paper, cut into approximate 4 x 6″ squares, on which I first storyboarded a conference presentation I made on 11.22.08
  • agenda of last week’s staff meeting for 2.009

Not junk, not junk at all. Really, artifacts.

And now I’m going to start something from this.  Let’s call it the School Bag Meme.  I tag my blogging and college teaching friends Alex, Dr. Poppy, James, Jan, and Rosemary.  What’s in yours, at this very moment? And how or why did it get there?