Notes, for Robert

 

                Do you remember writing notes in high school?

                I was watching a couple of girls elaborately folding paper on Friday while they waited for the rest of the class to catch up with the work.  One was creating a cootie catcher, the other, a lotus. Either could have been a note, to be passed hand to hand in a crowded corridor between classes. But students don’t write notes any more, even though they are still sitting in the back of math class, daydreaming.

                Notes were the glue of our friendship. Maybe because we went to a regional high school, where it was 45 minute drive between houses. Maybe it was that long distance calls were expensive and we were not allowed to talk on the phone for hours after our parents got the first bill. Maybe we just had more down time in our lives because there was less to distract us, especially during the cold, icy road winter.  The first note you gave to someone marked a new level in your relationship—you were someone they were thinking about when you were not around!

                We wrote about everything and nothing. My friend Barbara had spiky handwriting, drew horses and dragons in the corners of her paper, and continued the Dungeons and Dragons stories we were all considering—early Romtasty, some days. Mark wrote epic poems. Robert, with the nicest, roundest handwriting of all, wrote out Spanish verb conjugations as mini-lessons (he was the only one of us excited about learning another language).  My notes, with the same slanting the wrong way, slightly smudged ants on a log handwriting that earned me a failing penmanship grade in first grade, ranged from complaints about the English teacher to reporting on my most recent reading and the exploration of the heroic journey across novels.

 

                I was thinking about note writing already this weekend when I heard that one of my constant pen pals had died from a heart attack that day.  He was my high school friend, which is a deep, old friendship, even though we have not spoken in years. We were lab partners, dissecting a frog together. We shared English and Social Studies teachers, were in the same clubs, on the same field trips. In the afternoons, we rode home on the bus together, laughing, or, when we were older, borrowed his mother’s car and wandered the mall. We watched Grease three times because he loved Olivia Newton John. And—this is true friendship here-- he called me the day after prom to assure me that I had not missed anything. 

So much, in retrospect, went unsaid, even in those volumes of letters. No one ever said “I am gay” or “my parent drinks too much and they argue all the time” or “I am afraid to grow up because the world is dark right now”.  We had time. We would get there. We were young. And still, we were all haunted by James Taylor’s song, Fire and Rain on those long, cold bus rides, 6:30 in the morning, to pass a note written the night before, before class started at 7:25 AM…

Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you, baby
One more time again, now
Thought I'd see you one more time again
There's just a few things coming my way this time around, now
Thought I'd see you, thought I'd see you, fire and rain, now….

Cooking Lessons

 

                We have a very clear delineation of labour in our house—Mark holds the cat, I pill the cat; I hold the rabbit, Mark clears his butt; I prune, Mark processes compost; I cook, Mark washes the dishes. The divisions work well and save considerable argument, until one of us falls ill and takes to the couch. Usually I can fill in for Mark for a couple of days (I know how to do all of his chores but the taxes, and they can wait) but he can’t cook dinner without a lot of fuss, questioning, swearing, and crashing around.

                It is my fault. When we first met, he was not strong on any household skills, although, after a nasty night encounter with cockroaches in Texas, he understood why you needed to wash the dishes every day. I started teaching him how to cook from scratch early on. We talked about how to hold the knife, how to use a whisk with a firm wrist, and how to tell if something was done in the oven. I even made him a cookbook, divided into sections, where I copied recipes from my cookbooks and note cards, so that all of the information was in one place. He made progress. He taught himself how to make hot and sour soup and stewed beef in wine and thought about doing the same thing to some chicken. And then, we stopped.

                He says it was because I expected him to wash the dishes after cooking, rather than trading off the chore. I think it was because he moved into my kitchen and I am kitchen turfy. The truth is somewhere in between. So here we are, thirty years on, and he is not a confident cook. When I am not around, he can rummage in the fridge and cook a couple of eggs, heat up the leftovers, stem or roast some veg. He’s not above the co-op’s salad bar on a busy night. When I broke my arm, he was a decent prep cook, chopping veg and slicing the bread until I could bend my elbow again. He wants to do well, so he asks lots of questions.

                And so here we are. I had a cold last week that took out my brain for about twelve hours which spanned dinner. The options: order out, have Mark make something, which is often loud, or make dinner myself.  Last summer, I canned two dozen jars of tomato sauce just for these nights. Chop an onion, boil the spaghetti, and warm the tomatoes. Dinner. We can talk about cooking lessons later.

 

Pruning, Planning, and Pumpkin

 

This Sunday has been bout the three “p”s of January—pruning, planning, and pumpkin.

Pruning began last week, when I trimmed the laurel hedge hard on either side, enabling the neighbors to climb into their spare car on either side and open the fence gate while also shedding some light on the day lilies on our side of the hedge. Today, I worked on trimming the fig back off of the roof of the house. Then I hauled the branches back to the compost area, where some laurel, the Christmas tree, and some English ivy where waiting for processing. I am working my way counter-clock-wise around the house. Next is the apple and the plum, then the compost laurel and the hazelnut.  

Seed dreaming is also happening. I have my catalogs with pages marked—do I want to try the tomato that climbs 15 feet this year? Can I find the Green Grape tomato seeds again? What about plain petunias? This afternoon, I sorted through the seed tin to see what was left from last year and what needed to be purged. Soon, we will be ordering and planting, so the greenhouse needs a tidy s well.

Finally, there’s the pumpkins that I baked a few nights ago because they were about to rot. I’ve made soup and shepard’s pie with the results and, right now, there is a pumpkin cake for a potluck and pumpkin bread for our breakfasts in the over. And that is all of the pumpkin. There’s not even ny hiding in the back of the freezer.

 

The China Buffet

 

It was just dark when we walked over to the China Buffet last night. The sky was clear and an almost full moon leaned over the trees. Down all of the small, gridded streets of my neighborhood,  colored lights twinkled and shone from roofs and porches and branches—we leave our lights up for a long while in Oregon.  The air was cold and dry and it felt later than it actually was. The streets were quiet. In houses, groups were gathering, knocking on doors with one hand, balancing a platter in the other. New Year’s Eve.

Chinese food for New Years is traditional in my family. My urban cousins, from my father’s side, introduced my family to the concept and it felt very sophisticated, especially in comparison to the dreaded sauerkraut and pork my mother’s family swore by. One New Year’s Eve while I was still in college and home on Break, my mother and I found ourselves without plans for the night (no surprise for me, but very unusual for her.)  We went to the local Chinese restaurant, where you could get pink edged pork strips, and chicken chop suey, and pork fried rice, along with drinks in glasses shaped like the heads of Easter Island. We had just ordered when our neighbors from 15 years before, whom my mother had lost touch with, showed up. They sat down, ordered, and spent the evening remembering the past. We drove home in the cold dark, glimpses of lights in houses along the way, feeling rooted to the place.

A few years later, I lived in Newton, right down the street from the same sort of establishment. The big booths were covered in red “leather” and there was hot mustard along with the soy sauce on the table. We ate there at least twice a month—once, late at night on New Year’s Eve, when we left First Night before the fireworks to come home ahead of the crowds. It was dim, and warm, and welcoming. Home.

New Year’s Eve has always felt a bit melancholy for me. Even when I was young, it was never a great party night. So, because Mark loves a buffet, especially one where he can have two bowls of hot and sour soup, melon, sushi, and something deep fried,  we visit the New China Buffet once a year. It is warm, and bright, and welcoming. And then we walk home, start a fire, and see the old year out.