Let Me Help You With That

FOG

by: Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

THE fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

It comes as sort of an epiphany, at four thirty am, when my mind is open to epiphanies. My cat is using me.

Her name is Fog because she is grey and she has little cat's feet just like the poem, and she does spend a lot of time just looking at me and figuring out how to make me understand what she needs. She believes I am trainable. And sometimes, when she can't figure out how to convey her wishes and needs to me, she just moves on with no hard feelings and kills something to slack her appetites. Mice are so convenient, really: little packages of hydration, protein and pre-digested vegetable matter that reproduce themselves in climate controlled corners of the attic and basement and pantry. The fact that cats eat mice we view as a benefit to us. However, I can tell you that your cat will never hunt your house mice to extinction. They will always leave a few for that rainy day when you run out of cat food and try to substitute something lame like scrambled eggs. That MIGHT work for your dog.

Fog will occasionally make the grand gesture. Once she brought a newly killed mouse into the living room and plopped it down in front of the old, brain damaged Jack russell. He was so startled that poop shot out his butt like a cannon. In disgust she smacked him on the head, picked up her mouse and left the room with her tail straight up in an exclamation point.

Fog owns places in my house I will never visit. My family laughs at my efforts to keep her from slipping out the kitchen door to the yard because they say they routinely see her on the lawn in the moonlight. I have seen her footprints in the dust on my car. I think the sounds I have attributed to the "ghost in the attic" are actually her using the old coats and Christmas wrap. She gets up there by jumping first on to the fridge in the kitchen. From there, she leaps at a 45 degree angle up to where the cabinets meet the ceiling. There is a hole up there through to the unfinished room above. She might actually climb up the inside of the wall to get into the attic. I am afraid that some day she might get stuck. I am afraid of that because I am human, not a cat, with a cat's confidence.

Fog greets every guest to the house, after the dogs are finished their hysterical STRANGER DANGER WHAT FUN slobbering, barking and jumping. She assesses visitors for usefulness by presenting her rear for scratching. She is happiest with a sort of unconscious stroking. If you get enthusiastic and try to place her on your lap, she assertively wiggles out of your grasp and calmly moves beyond reach, sending an unmistakeable message of NO THANKS - a move all young women should learn. No hard feelings, just NO.

On cool nights when I have the fire going, she will sit next to me on the sofa - once the dogs are settled. Her gorgeous, long, white whiskers enchant me as do the perfectly symmetrical swirls of dark among light of her fur. And then she purrs and all is right with the world.

The other day, I was doing chores and she came to fetch me - very declarative meows and short running bursts toward the kitchen. I put down my dust cloth (OH SERIOUSLY - do you think I was dusting? I was staring into space in the living room with the TV on, holding the dust cloth, in a Law and Order Stupor.) Anyhow, I put the dust cloth down, followed her into the kitchen while she frantically jumped on to the table where I keep her food and water out of reach of rude, opportunistic dogs. She stood next to her water and HOWLED - A gut wrenching, operatic mournful sound that caused people in three counties to stop what they were doing and glance toward heaven and cross themselves.

There was a moth, flapping in the water. I flicked it out, she elegantly stretched, dipped down to the bowl and sniffed. Turned her back to it and stared at the kitchen sink. I picked up the bowl, carried it to the sink, emptied it out, swished it with dishwashing liquid, filled it with fresh water, placed it back on the table. Stretching again, she sniffed the water again, found it satisfactory and began to lap with her perfect pink tongue.

Not til 18 hours later, in the middle of another sleepless night, did the full impact of this hit me. If my cat can work me like this, how well trained am I? My CAT has my number. My cat, simply by observing me on a daily basis, knows she can work me. Not only work me, but get me to perform. Tricks. Had I ignored her, she could have gotten that moth out, or she would have sipped that moth water, all the same. Perhaps she would have eaten the moth. Maybe it could have become Moth Broth. I've seen her catch them while they were beating themselves to death against the window, and then crunch them like potato chips.

And because it is an epiphany, and the middle of the night and my mind is free to wander, and because it is close to the third anniversary of his death, I am thinking about the time Charles told me he knew he would marry me. I had asked - and he said, "it was because of the movies, that time." "That time?" He says, "yes, that time at the movies. I think it was our third date or so. There was something gross happening on screen, I turned to you and pretended to gag. And you put your hands up toward me, cupping them."

I don't remember this, and it stuns me. "Like I was going to catch your..."

He says, "Yes. At that moment, I knew you would be my wife."

This was not the romantic declaration I was looking for. But he goes on, "I figured that a girl who would do that, well, would be a woman that I could count on."

So. I think about how angry I have been, for so long. I was a woman he could count on, many many many times, and a lot of the times I resented being counted on. Sometimes I was tired and sometimes I did not want to be the one cleaning up the mess. Sometimes I felt my good nature was used and abused. And then, he died and I was angry. SO angry. He died alone in that truck, and I remember thinking, that bastard. He was not sick, I could not hold his head. He was not in pain, and I could not make it better by fetching something or offering a glass of water. I did not get to pound his chest or press my lips to his to force air down his throat. I did not call the ambulance. Instead, I sit and listen, numb on my sofa, to two cops tell me the story of how he was found. When I ask, they say, the body was identified by the customer who found him. No need to go to the morgue. They hand me a slip of paper with a phone number on it, but tell me I really don't have to call. I will get a report when the coroner is through. They tell me that I don't need to do anything. My job as wife is over.

The Edge

Charles has been dead three years, soon, and all my knives are dull.

When Fred came to visit with his family, I bought a beautiful roast of beef - something I do not do very often. He trained as a butcher and he loved these big cuts of beef, slowly, barely cooked, with rosemary and garlic pushed in. I was sure he was not getting such things in Iraq, and that he would appreciate that I remembered his preference.

I even had a chat with the butcher at the grocery store when I was picking it out, something else I do not do often. I wanted the butcher to pick out a really pretty roast, something another butcher would like. These cinematic moments only ever roll out in my mind so I don't know why I keep trying - black and white film clips clattered through the projector in my brain, calendar leaves flying, me - finally morphed into an odd melange of Ma Kettle grasping a flag to her chest and Aunt Bea in an apron holding a pie, adoring family paying homage to my efforts, local butcher presenting a huge hunk of flesh into a light from above and saying "Your soldier will appreciate this, Ma'am!"

At least I was expecting this at Wegmans' - a cut above - but instead, the young man (who apparently does not share my rich mental catalog of iconic images) merely pointed to the second one in, a three bone in rib roast, and said "That one looks good." and reached for the waxed paper.

My oven is broken, the heating element at the bottom blown out during a period of dank depression when I might have left it on all night or maybe for a day or two. Maybe a week. The oven that broke was not the oven I ever wanted: it was cheap, from the scratch and dent store and was supposed to make do until we had the money for the kitchen renovation. That money was going to appear shortly after every other single thing in our lives was taken care of. All oven type activities now take place in a stand alone, plug in roaster, which is pitch hitting for the oven I never wanted, until I get the stove I deserve and that is where I put the roast when I get home. But lately I have been thinking, maybe not. Maybe I will have a kitchen but not a kitchen, because after the kids move into the addition, am I going to do any real baking? As opposed to fake baking? I hardly use the roaster. Maybe I don't want a fancy oven any more.

Which makes me wonder if it is sad or happy that I may be giving up the idea of a dream kitchen, which was the fuel for terrible arguments and intense middle of the night cravings, and the hook that I hung all my martyrdom and justifications on. If I never, ever get a six thousand dollar dual fuel, self cleaning convection oven and a stove with a built in griddle down the middle, and I make that decision on my own, based on practicality and present need, if I give up that dream, that tightly held desire, which I have picked all the scabs off and used as my red badge of courage, the lack of which was the visualization of just how truly my needs and wants have been denied, who the heck am I?

And who am I having this argument with now?

Soon the roast is done, and I rest it for half an hour. I have heard that this is the single biggest mistake that home cooks make, not resting their meat. You see, you get your roast chicken or leg of lamb or roast of beef out of the oven, cover it all over with foil, and let it sit for a half hour before you cut. This way the juices stay in and don't run out all over your cutting board. I am a great, knowledgeable cook. I have created wonderful, memorable meals for multitudes of people in a terrible kitchen for thirty years. Lasagna, meringues, steamed shrimp and stir fry, roasts and pot roasts, jars of tomato sauce and jam, pickled green beans and red beet eggs, thanksgiving turkeys and chicken and dumplings, lamb rolled in rosemary and pepper, chocolate cookies and lemon sponge cakes, home made pasta, countless loaves of bread. The SOUP! The nameless mishmashes of leftovers that turned out to be delicious. I have done all this, I realize, in a kitchen that has two cabinets whose lowest shelf is 18 inches over my head, a sixty year old stainless steel sink, exactly three feet of counter space, no dishwasher, 1/2 inch to spare if you open the fridge and the oven at the same time, missing floor tiles and exposed plumbing traces to the second floor the cat uses to chase mice. My kitchen counter had little flecks of gold sparkle in it when it was installed after WW2, which you can only see now if you move the canisters. Not to mention seven doorways and two windows. All of these conditions grist for resentment and seething, stewing discontent and the springboard for imaginative problem solving and VOILA moments. For instance, if you don't have enough counter space, you get a cutting board that fits over your sink - that adds two feet. And one that fits over the top of your stove - when the stove is off, that is another two feet or so. If you don't have a dishwasher and company is coming before the dishes get done, put them in the oven til the next morning. In the winter, you can keep your extra groceries on the back porch - it's cold enough. If you keep the stuff under your sink organized in plastic tubs, it is really easy to get them out fast when the pipes freeze and burst.

And now, possessing the where with all to make all those headaches and compromises go away, I suddenly am not sure I care any more. I can buy that stove, I can have all new cabinets, I can have anything I really want, the way I want it.

I pull the carving knife and fork out of the block to carve the rested meat. Instead of the elegant slice I am expecting, I end up sawing and mangling. The roast falls apart in delicious but ugly chunks. Very embarassing because by this time Fred is watching me and I feel exposed and pathetic. The knives are all dull. I don't know where the steel is and I don't know how to use it. Charles used to stand in the kitchen and expertly flick the knives back and forth and listen to me bitch about how terrible the kitchen was. He used to say, Stop cutting directly on the counter, you are going to ruin this knife. I would retort, I can't hurt this crappy counter and I am going to get better knives! And then we would sit down and eat a fine meal and later that night I would go to sleep, feeling sorry for myself and what I had to put up with. He honed the knives and I sharpened my resentment for decades. And now I know it takes just three years for both to lose their edge.

A Papaya Like Memory

The last time I saw a papaya, I was in my grandmother's garden, on my first day in Australia. I was looking over the Brisbane River, watching pelicans land. I was five and a half years old, had just spent three days on planes (this was prior to jet engines), I had crossed the international date line and I was missing my father and my cat - who were home in the states. So many strange, fragrant colorful things I was seeing for the first time: frangipani, poinsettas in a hedge as tall as the house, kookaburras, funny cars, palm trees, houses without heaters or frig's.

So when I was in Wegman's fruit section last Sunday (fighting off the usual anxiety attack that grocery stores evoke since Charles died) and in front of me was a huge green blob labeled PAPAYA, I had to buy it. I seemed to remember that they were a color other than green in that garden, and I don't remember them being so big, and it seemed unusually firm for a melony fruit. The grocery store anxiety attack usually takes on mindless flinging of crapedoodle into a cart, rushed careening down the aisles trying to remember what I need (toothpaste? dishwashing liquid?) and decisions involving food that won't look lonely when cooked in pans too big for dinner for one. So, I was pretty sure I didn't need a papaya, but it was big enough to not look silly, and of course, I could corner my grandchildren in the kitchen and tell them why the papaya was important to me while DIL and Son rolled their eyes. A family moment, in a fruit! What more could you ask for?

At home, I decided it needed a few days to ripen, and then got distracted by...well, going to New York, etc. So this morning, I gave it a feel-up, it was noticeably softer and had turned a spottled orange. I was going to slice that thing open and eat a MEMORY!

And take photos.

And blog it. Cause that is who I am now - a blogging, exotic fruit eating Sunday lounger!

Well, either I let this sucker ripen much too much OR when I was a kid my tastebuds were so bored by red delicious apples and the occasional strawberry, but it was a little disappointing.

Sort of like sweet, soft pumpkin. Not inspiring. Which left me with the feeling that memories, of fruit or otherwise, are probably best savored fresh and in your mind, rather than physically recreated on a cold kitchen counter thousands of miles and decades from the original moment. I think I will go scramble some eggs. I wonder if goats will eat papaya?