Sunday, November 27, 2022
In bed at 8:45, up at 3:52, many, many pss, no toddy. Bait bucket thoughts flitting through brain.
Chef de Cuisine
Not really. Geri is the chef de cuisine in this house. She does however tolerate my making homemade soup and bread. I've been wanting to make more of each category lately. Yesterday I went to Sendik's intending to pick up some beef shanks to use in making the brother for a sweet sour cabbage borscht. Whoa. No beef shanks at the store, no cabbage borscht. Last night however we were at Whole Foods and I picked up some vegetable brother and a head of cauliflower so I could make a pot of cauliflower bacon soup, which I did this afternoon. It's been so long since I made it, I couldn't tell from the looks of it whether it seemed to be the same as my last batch. Time will tell. . . 3 p.m., had some, very good.😋
Recorded Memories
This morning on CBS NEWS SUNDAY MORNING, filmmaker Joshua Seftel had a segment on his mother who was recovering from a quadruple heart bypass at age 85. What caught my attention was his statement "Several years ago when my father died, I bought my Mom an iPad and started FaceTiming with her. We recorded more than 100 conversations, several for this show." I made me think, not surprisingly I suppose, of my 5 or 6 years of daily text conversations with Kitty and the fact that I've never erased or deleted any of them from my iPhone or MacAir laptop. In fact, I have made several attempts to print all of them and had some success but found that it's not all that easy to go WAY back in time to pull up old texts for printing. I'm not entirely sure why I have wanted to print all those conversations. Whenever I look at them, I recall how much a part of each other's life we were, how much a part, a fortifying part, of each and every day those morning conversations were. How many mornings? 2000? 1900? I've been a bit beset by the thought that when she died a part of me died with her and I think it is true. No one can take her place in my life and I know no one could take my place in hers. We spent 15 years together as children, from her birth in 1944 until I left for college in 1959. She shared with me more than once something I never knew until she told me, that she was devastated when I moved away to another city. I was surprised when I learned that but on reflection it's not at all surprising. I suspect my mother was too. I'm appalled by my self-absorption and insensitivity at having no clue what my leaving home might mean to my mother and my sister. I have no notion of how my father may have felt since the relationship between the two of us was so complicated. But I suppose it's true for some of us, perhaps most of us, that we undervalue our significance to significant others in our lives. And perhaps until we reach old age, we probably undervalue the significance of others to us. We don't know how much someone means to us until they are gone except that the older we get the keener our recognition of the importance of those close to us. The good news is that we can try to tailor our behavior toward those significant others to reflect our deep connection to them. The bad news is that we are so aware of our vulnerability to loss and pain when we painfully and usually involuntarily imagine life without the other. I think of Jimmy and Nancy Aquavia, of Jimmy and Nancy Cummings, of my mother and father., and mostly I think of Geri and me and of fear.
Old friends, old friends . . .
How terribly strange
To be seventy
Old friends
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fear.
Simon and Garfunkel
So if you're walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes
Please don't just pass 'em by and stare as if you didn't care
Say, "Hello in there, hello"
John Prine
PP Returned Today with Plumbing Distress Despite having no coffee, wine, or soda for 5 days. The body's a scary mystery I live in. 39 days to see doc.
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