Comfort Food

Comfort food

The food you eat when you are sad, sick, lonely, in short, in need of comfort. It may be food your mother made when you were a kid. It may be some food you have come upon as an adult that you eat to feel better: cereal, toast and butter, mac’n’cheese, pasta. For me it can be oatmeal, poached eggs on toast, toasted cheese and tomato soup. That last most clearly demonstrates the distance I have come as an eater since growing up in my Central New York, working class family.
What is to change about toasted cheese and tomato soup? The name for one thing. It is most often called grilled cheese now, implying the sandwhich is made on a grill. Toasted cheese is actually another dish in which cheese is put under the broiler and toasted. My mother made toasted cheese sandwiches with American cheese on white bread, which may have been home made when Iwas a kid. And she made Campbell’s tomato soup with milk. The sandwich was cooked in butter. The basic ingredients.
Later, in the pressure of the food industry in America she switched to Roman meal whole grain bread. I can’t remember if I protested. If I did it wasn’t as vociferously as my children complained about whole grain breads. Sometime the cheese was Velveeta. Sometimes chedder.
We never cooked with margarine, a holdover from my mother’s Depression experiences. I switched to making the soup with water as a teen ager worried about my weight. I my twenties, with small kids of my own, the combination began to evolve from its middle class beginnings into a lunch or snack of a much different character.
With very little money to live on, I made a lot of my own bread. For awhile, when we got surplus food, we went back to Velveeta type cheese. Once we got on our feet, we could buy the real stuff: Munster, Swiss, Aged Chedder, Provolone. And those are just the sandwich cheeses. I continued to make and buy whole grain bread in a brazen disregard for my children’s preferences and in the firm belief that it was better not to eat any bread than to eat the Styrofoam stuff that came from the store. I still cooked in butter. I mean olio is some kind of goo that is derived from non-food material, right? So the sandwich changed, but not so much as the soup.
I still use Campbell’s tomato, still don’t use milk. But over the years I have added various things: garlic, a bit of olive oil, a dab of butter, dill. Mostly dill, because it tastes so good with the tomatoes. And there is always basil, another real tomato compliment. Basil, fresh from the garden, spicy-sweet, filling the kitchen with its sharp scent. Basil, dried. Basil and garlic with perhaps a bit of parmesan. The soup grows richer, “mouthier’ acquiring what flavorists call umame: Umami, popularly referred to as savoriness, has been proposed as one of the basic tastes sensed by specialized receptor cells present on the human and animal tongue. Umami (旨味?) is a loanword from Japanese meaning roughly "tasty", although "brothy", "meaty", or "savory" have been proposed as alternative translations.[1][2] In as much as it describes the flavor common to savory products such as meat, cheese, and mushrooms, umami is similar to Brillat-Savarin's concept of osmazome, an early attempt to describe the main flavoring component of meat as extracted in the process of making stock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami).
Thus what started out as simple comfort food has become a marker of education. My palate has changed and developed as I have eaten around the world and among friends with more food sophistication than I have. My vocabulary has changed; I know words like umami, that my parents would have though pretensious. My class has changed. I am not a blue collar person now, though I began there. Toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, then and now, mark my progress through life.

A yard full of EMTs

I was brought up (mostly) and deeply loved by my Aunt Mattie who nearly died from eclampsia and who lost her only child in that process. The family told the story as families do, in whispers and allusions. I don't know the details. I do know the Protestant Irish side of the family blamed the Catholic hospital for her near death: "You know," they murmured, "they save the baby first, and then worry about the mother." I might try to find the death records later. I am just reporting now.
So eclampsia niggles around in the back of my mind every time someone I know is pregnant. And then Elana has headaches. I am mentally running in circles and shrieking. When she gets the blurred vision, I know what has happened. I am on the computer searching for eclampsia when Seth yells from upstairs in a tone that brooks no hesitation. I sprint for the stairs to see him struggling to hold her as she goes into grand mal seizures.
grand mal seizures.
The following are the immediate notes, from that day:
Eclampsia. An angel delivered Ron into the house from work
at exactly that moment.
EMT's arrived. They raced off to the hospital, had to
trach her, her airway and tongue were so swollen. C-section.

Immediate delivery is the only solution to eclampsia, the only way to save the mother.
When they put her in the rig, I was pretty sure we had lost her. Had no idea about the baby.
They got to the hospital and most of the ER, OB and Neonate workers were waiting in the ambulance bay. We learned later that student nurses were called down to watch. This is not voyeurism.
No one sees eclampsia any more. Better prenatal care catches the pre-eclampsia. They put the woman to bed and give her stuff to lower her blood pressure. Full blown eclampsia is such a rarity that the OB who delivered the baby had not seen it.

All this sounds calm. We are educated. We are a medical family. We handle panic through information.
NO WE DO NOT.
Information is good. But it does not control the terror, not horror movie, fun terror, the real terror in the face of the death of a young woman and her baby. A daughter-in-law, a grandchild.
Terror possesses the body, inhabits your stomach, your head, you shoulders and toes which curl under. Really. And then it crawls off and lurks in the form of anxiety. It keeps you up or puts you to sleep. It makes you weepy or surly, snappish and stupid. Deep breathing helps, maybe. It did keep me from screaming and running around. Various things helped at various times: prayer, a friend showing up, mostly Amy's calm transmission of any information we needed and Ron's interpretations of all the ICU speak.
I never liked horror movies. I don't like being scared. I like it a lot less now. I need a Doris Day movie, I think. Or maybe just another long walk with the dog.

Illness as illness, not metaphor

So somewhere along the line we all got duped. The baby boomers that is. We were supposed to be invincible, eternally young, powerful.
At the moment five friends of mine have cancer, my husband has prostate cancer, another friend has Alzheimers'. How did that happen? We got suddenly old and we didn't expect it. My parents did, expect it. They knew from caring for their old parents, that after 50 or so, it was over. People got old, they dwindled, they died. They got eccentric or demented. Men had heart attacks. Women got "female trouble" and lingered for years, suffering. There was not much to do for them. Medicine up to about 60 years ago was palliative. Hence people's attitude was more realistic, grimmer. I have the sort of temperament that thinks grimmer is ok.
I exercise. I try to eat well but don't deny myself much, except perhaps in portion size. My friends do the same. My husband smoked for 40 years and finally quit. He eats whatever and how much of it he wants. My health conscious friends have cancer. My husband has cancer. My friend has Alzheimer's. Except for morbid obesity, which does clearly limit life, not much else seems to matter. Genes and dumb luck. But our grandparents knew that.
My point here that I am exhausted by health news. My well, so far, friends who go on about diet and water and vitamins and exercise have worn out my patience for such discussions. We are all going to get something. We are all going to die. Can we go back to talking about books now?

Fall

Fall seems like such a season of changes, perhaps because we are moving into the dark of the year and we resist the changes. We have pulled all the vegetables and added compost and manure to the gardens. We will mulch and leave them over the winter. The tomato late blight really dampened the fun of gardening this summer, though the purple beans and peas did very well. The cucumbers didn't, but they never do. I need to test the soil for ph.
Days are visibly shorter. School has started. Changes. In my climate, where there is real winter, there is never enough summer. In the south, by September I was frantic for it to cool down, to be able to open windows again, for fall flowers. Here, there is a desperate last blooming. Asters, Queen Anne's lace, golden rod cover the roadsides. This year there has been so much rain that the flowers embody the word 'profuse." In the garden, golden and red mums begin to look like a reflection of the turning trees, a last glory before the snow comes. Here, where we could have snow in the a month or so.
Seth and Elana are coming in a month, snow would not be the welcome we'd hope to give them. Better the soft golden glow of a long warm autumn, the richness of Keat's sonnet laid out in welcome, apples, pumpkins, cornstalks and the mellow hazy air that marks a good October. The year disappearing softly into winter, a season most of us dislike. That is all right. We should dislike winter. It is hard and deadly. There will be a winter baby here this year, a new life coming around the solstice, to mark the turn of the light, the lengthening days, like the buds that lie furled on branches through the winter, promising.

Yoga Class

I hurt my back a couple of years ago and was out of aikido, my usual exercise. So I took a yoga class, as soon as I could sort of walk again. Believe me, there may be malingerers out there, but back pain is massively incapacitating. I got tired of crawling around my house and wanted more (or less) than a surgical solution. Steroids got me on my feet again. But clearly, my back was now damaged. Permanently. So I found a yoga class. And an instructor who is kindness itself. Or so I thought until we got to the end of the first class.
There we are, lying on our backs on the floor. Those of us with bad backs have our knees bent, others are flat down. Let me first explain that although I think of myself as non-competitive, I am. So all class I have been struggling to keep up and worried about not doing whatever as well as the woman next to me. So now I am reduced to competitively relaxing.
“Relax your toes,” David intones. I flex and then relax my toes. By the time I’ve finished, he’s up to the knees. Trying to stay relaxed, I race to catch up. This isn’t competition, I remind myself. It is, indeed, the very opposite. It is supposed to be the very opposite. By now he is telling us “walk your attention up our spine.” My mat is sticky. The room is hot. I don’t like the smell. I am not relaxing. The person next to me breathes elaborately slowly, noisily. My attention is not walking up my spine.

“Now let go your personality muscles,” the instructor goes on. I’ve missed the neck and shoulders, so I struggle to relax my face: mouth slackens. Years of smiling fall away. Words dribble out of the softened lips. My crow’s feet fly away, laugh crinkles melt back into the flesh of my face. Personality, character drain into the floor, leaving me plain. Mother lines, wife lines, grief, fear, intelligence all go. I sigh out a deep breath, imagining my face null, my life gone from it. Terror grips me, but I no longer have a face to register it. I lay there, blissfully outside myself. For a moment

David’s intrudes softly over the breathing of my neighbor as he tells us to wiggle our toes and feet. To imagine energy coming back into our bodies. “Listen to the sounds in the room.” My neighbor’s stenotic breathing. “And the sounds outside.” A dog barks somewhere. It is raining. “When you are ready, open your eyes.” Open them? That would mean using those muscles I’ve let go. It would bring back my crow’s feet. Deep breath. Open my eyes. Return from the oblivion of deep relaxation. I roll over, tuck my legs up under me and stand, relaxed. Not sure I want my personality back. Maybe I could get another one? What happens to them as we relax? For a moment I imagine David shuffling them among the people lying on their mats, oblivious. But he calls my name and says goodnight, so I am fairly sure I am still myself. I look in the mirror. Yep, my crow’s feet, my worry lines. But more relaxed. I walk out into the rain.

Dog

The neighbor's mastiff lies behind me, snoring. She spends part of almost everyday with us. My daughter adores her, and Sam loves her back. The daughter is working, but I have the dog because I am a sucker for big sad faces. And mastiffs have those. The snoring starts softly.
It has been raining here since mid-June. Really. I think we missed a couple of days but not more than one or two. Usually I take the Mastiff, aka Sam, and our dog to the park down the street. They can get off lease there and run around. We've been today. And now both dogs are asleep. I assume the rumbling is thunder. The floor vibrates softly. Not thunder. Sam is deep asleep and snoring. I am not making this up. The floor does vibrate slightly. One hundred and sixty pounds of dog rumbling vibrates through the floor.

My dog glares at her. Sam takes up most of the free floor space. My dog, Padme (don't ask) feels excluded. She an aloof beast and Sam craves affection. So Sam will move right in and demand petting, while Padme looks resentfully on. They have had two spats and seem to have worked out their relationship. Like two-year olds, they vie for attention, take each other's toys and food and then complain to their humans. No wonder people think of them as their 'children'. I could rant on that, but I just wanted to write about Sam snoring and me thinking it was far off thunder. Dogs are dogs, not babies, not kids, just companions whose breathing comforts us in our loneliness.

Life Failures in all seriousness

The trim on my house needs to be painted. I can’t do it and get it done in one summer.
Which is why the trim on half the windows is yellow and half blue. And some of the white parts aren’t any more. They are flaky. Those parts are too hard for someone without lots of experience in high places. So I have to get bids and pick a painter. This is anxiety producing. Mainly because of money. The last time I checked this out the painters wanted $3000. That is THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS. Hence the half-finished look which reproaches me every time I drive up to the house.

It looks slovenly. The yellow windows imply laziness, poor financial planning, and a general unworthiness. IF I had only WORKED HARDER at my career, I’d have money. (Or I would have finished the damn painting.) OR I could have married money but I didn’t. So I don’t have pots of money to throw at painters. If I had done those things, one or the other of them, I’d be able to afford a painter without stressing about it. I could call, get bids, pick the one I think most suitable and they would arrive with brushes and ladders and my chosen color of paint. They would scrape and scaffold and paint, and in a few days, I’d have have new looking trim. Some, I”m sure, would need replacing. Go ahead, I’d say. Fix it. And not sneak in the house to fret over the cost.

Painters will arrive. The work will get done. I will fret over the cost, over where the money will come from, while the primary breadwinner in our family goes off to even more over-time shifts and I feel feckless. This is the deal we have made in our marriage, but I am no longer comfortable with it. At my age a serious career is not looming over me. So I am stuck feeling that I should paint. I should do the work I can’t pay for. In future this could and probably will get worse, as lawn mowing and snow shovellng become more challenging.

Solutions? I have none. Who knows when or if we will ever be able to retire. The economy has twice fallen out from under our retirement funds, leaving the future precarious and anxiety producing. Panic inducing actually. Anxiety doesn’t describe it.
A house is a money sink. I have lived in a condominium and hated it. What to do? An apartment makes having a dog and even a cat, a challenge. A condo has no resale. A tent perhaps, though in my climate that would certainly put the challenge of pets and apartments into perspective.

Today, it is raining. You can’t paint in the rain. I suppose I could make a few calls. The painter won’t get cheaper. And if we get it done now, we won’t have to think about it for years. Perhaps never again. And it will be one less thing to obsess about.