Non-Christmas

So we went to The Kung Pao Kosher Comedy Jewish Comedians show on the 23rd, bought bagels & cream cheese on the 24th, and celebrated in high style by going to a Chinese restaurant and then seeing a movie on the 25th with a Jewish friend, ‘natch.

It’s been the first time I’ve eaten at a Chinese restaurant (aka unofficial Jewish temple) on the 25th, and it was crowded! I loved it.

It’s the 365th day of 2007, and we’re in the homestretch.

See you on the flip side.

Sanity

This blog has given me an unexpected amount of sanity and joy and sense of accomplishment.  It has brought me to myself, in a kind of public meditation.  It has been a wonderful present to myself.

I first contemplated blogging a year ago — I always like starting new things at the official beginning of something: a year, a month, a week, etc.   I even had a theme and had my husband quite excited about it, too.  But in my mind it became burdensome and not at all fun, so I gave up on the thing before I even started.

This time around, I wanted to accomplish something.  I didn’t want another journal full of handwritten pages in my flowing script, in my favorite ink colors.  No, I wanted an electronic record, one that would keep me honest.

Back around Labor Day, I saw a friend whom I hadn’t seen since the previous 4th of July, so about fourteen months.  He couldn’t have been any more different since July.

For one, he had just gotten engaged.  Back in July, he had been still licking his wounds from a breakup two months previous.  In September, he was overflowing with the newly-acquired love, extroverted and showing me pictures of the finance (Raising Arizona shout-out), funny, happy, and full of love.  There was nothing wrong in his world, no positive spin he couldn’t make.  He was a springtime daffodil bathed in sunlight.

Second, he had taken control of his diabetes through excellent diet control and increase in exercise.  As he put it, his doctor told him to eat better and get more exercise.  With the newly acquired girlfriend, he was taking Argentine tango classes and without her, he was practicing some sort of martial art.  He looked fantastic; he must have lost twenty pounds, possibly more.

Third, he was co-writing a novel with a SF writer of importance, as well as perfecting some stories for publication in SF magazines, in addition to his day job as a programmer at Apple.

From my viewpoint, his life was going as well as a life could.  As well as I wanted my life to go.  I felt like an overweight and uncreative beast, just denied entrance into a party of the slim and creative.  I was not unhappy with my life then, but extremely envious of his weight loss and his creative success: those were the two areas I felt lacking.

So this blog flows from that, as I know I need to write daily to become a better writer, just as I need to make smart choices about the food I eat daily.  For me, it’s a marathon and not a sprint, and that’s what makes it so hard.

I want to be the best me I can.  It sounds simple, but there are so many choices to make in my daily life.  And I’m meditating to help keep track of whether or not I’m in the present moment every moment, and exercising to get a good neurotransmitter rush as necessary, and setting goals so I know where I’m going.  I feel that I have been a bit aimless the last several years, a direct result of not having a path, a plan for getting where I want to be.  So I’m correcting the course in 2008, using tools, and this blog will offer me data on the journey.

And, happily, starting this blog has been nothing but fun and easy to do.

Namaste.

Sick a la Shel Silverstein

“I cannot go to school today,

said little Peggy Ann Mackay,

I have the measles and the mumps,

a gash, a rash, and purple bumps.”

This may have been the first poem I ever had to memorize in school, for Mrs. Grimshaw’s 4th grade class. Shel Silverstein was a big name in kid poetry back then, and I loved his collection of poems, _A Light in the Attic_, that he illustrated himself. The drawings are as whimsical and fun as the poetry. Even as an unsophisticated nine year old, I could recognize high caliber talent.

Committed to memory lo so many years ago, it is now in my long-term memory, or at least the first four lines of it. In “Sick,” after little Peggy lists her litany of symptoms and disorders, she realizes

“…what, you say to day is Saturday? Then I’m going out to play!” Love it. Three cheers for Shel Silverstein.

Last night’s lentil soup was delish but didn’t keep the sore throat and fatigue at bay. Husband went out to the farmer’s market without me, only to discover to his chagrin (such a fun turn of phrase!) that it was cancelled today, ostensibly for the holiday week. This is the first year in five that we are not in NY this Christmas week, so we didn’t know that’s how the farmer’s market schedule does.

For all we knew, our neighbors built an enormous bonfire in the middle of the block every Christmas Eve that burned right on through New Year’s Eve.

I weighed myself today, the first time in a while. Certainly the first time after all the butter-rich Christmas cookies, shortbread, homemade Russian tea cakes, blueberry cheesecake, Russian chocolates my sister’s patients gave to her as presents, Lindt dark chocolate truffles, See’s chocolate, Tully’s venti-v soy- mocha-no & a generous helping ofbuttery-streuselicious crumb cake and post-funeral banana bread with Scharffen Berger 70% chocolate, El Pollo Loco’s rotisserie pollo, Kung Pao Comedy’s veggie eggrolls and pre-Kung Pao Comedy’s barbecue pork buns and bamboo-leaf wrapped rice pyramids from a hole-in-the-wall on Stockton Street in SF Chinatown, and I had lost two pounds.

No kidding.

I have founded a new diet: rice (brown) & beans (black) for breakfast. The high-fiber, high-protein combo keeps my appetite in check until late enough in the day that I only eat two meals a day now.

No kidding.

It’s also the post-pet death diet, where I’m not that interested in food. Maybe it’s all the meditation I’ve been doing, also.

Whatever it is, it’s working, I’m not asking questions, and I’ve got more to lose before we fly to Kona in March, a scant 8 weeks away. -******************************* (That was Miss Thang adding her two cents, after jumping onto my desk).

Will have to expand on our Jewish-for-Christmas 2007 theme later.

Soups, Glorious Soups!

My dad detested soups, thought it was a waste of stomach volume which could have been filled with food instead. Soup was for poor people who couldn’t afford food, in his mind. So my mom, who was a fan of lightly flavored broths, gave them up. It was one of those Sixties marriages, where it isn’t worth the work and effort to make two dinners if the wife doesn’t like what the husband wants for dinner.

So early in our marriage when my husband told me how he loves soups in the winter months — lentil, butternut squash purees, split pea, minestrone, chicken with egg noodles, French onion, cauliflower — I realized there was an entire category of cooking in which I was completely unschooled. And I had to admit that accompanied with the right bread, it was a filling meal.

Then I remembered all those cooking shows where the vegetables are sauteed then finished in a Cuisinart, or with a hand mixer right in the pots. That seemed kind of neat, trying something higher on the difficulty scale and with so much flair!

I’ve mastered quite a few now, and they are all tasty. One reason I wasn’t interested in soups was because it seemed I’d never had a good homemade soup. In many kitchens, the soup literally is the previous day’s leftover vegetables thrown into a pot with water and salted. There wasn’t any effort, but there’s an entire world of soups and cooking techniques and flavor mastery out there.

Tonight I’m making what’s modestly called “Hearty Lentil Soup,” when I think it’s the best lentil soup I’ve ever had. It has lots of flavors layered on top of each other, and on a cold evening like tonight, I can’t wait to tuck into it with some toasted Dutch Crunch bread with real butter. (I only indulge in real butter from Thanksgiving through the New Year).

Bon Appetit!

One Last Cry

While the world mourns Benazir Bhutto’s assassination today, I’m mourning the death of my cat.

He died last week of acute renal failure, we’ll never know what caused it. It doesn’t really matter now, anyway, but that fact doesn’t keep me from torturing myself. Was it the NSAID he took for a few days back in July? Did he take some experimental licks of antifreeze that puddled into the street? Could I have prevented it? My mind keeps going over these facts, as if determining the cause somehow changes the harsh fact of his death. That, this time around as I try to solve the mystery, I will find his death averted.

Sorry for the schmaltz, for the rehashing of what happens to everyone who loses someone they dearly love. Is there nothing more common in human experience? Yet in my 36 years on this planet, this is the first death that has affected me. I was not close to my three grandparents that are no longer with us; we lived thousands of miles away from each other. My cat was with me every single day for the last 9 and 1/2 years.

I find myself struggling and crying when I am alone. Sure, I know it’s the process, but it feels like it’s never going to end.

Worse are the mornings I wake up and I think he’s still alive, though very ill. I can’t wait to get out of bed to tend to him, to check on him in the dog crate he spent his last days in. I can’t seem to accept his death, and on those mornings somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, I’m hoping for a do-over.

I bought ten jars of baby food two days before he died. He had expressed some interest in some beef Gerber’s the day before, so I took a long lunch and bought him enough to nurse him through the illness. (At the time, the vet expressed her opinion that he had a kidney stone, and that we need only wait it out. She said that if he was still ailing in a month to bring him in). This morning I saw the jars of baby food in the cabinet and the tears just came. I have to donate those jars. I have to get them out of the house.

It’s only been a week since we buried him in the backyard. Because he died at the vet hospital while I was asleep, it was important for me to see him one last time, for closure. Seeing his small body one last time was incredibly painful, but I am so grateful for it. And I had a wonderful sense that he was still with us, at home, in the backyard. We buried him in a part of the yard that gets a lot of sun, a fitting place for those little sun-worshippers.

I curse the last few days I had with him, which I didn’t know were the last, of course. I wish I had spent more time with him, tending to him, quietly with him. I didn’t. I took his last hours with me completely for granted. It may be for this that I am saddest of all.

So I cry and cry and know it will get easier each day.

I meditate and do yoga and try to stay in the moment as much as humanly possible.  What else is there to do?

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