Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Upholding Tradition: Mexican Bean Salad and Rocky Horror

My visit to Ypsilanti was quite nice. I saw my parents, of course, and my sister, and Nigel the cat, plus the cat who came to drink from the bird bath out back. We ate and talked and watched lots of DVDs; my mother, ever the bad influence, tried to get me to stay up the entire night before my return flight watching movies. I lasted for three in a row.

At one point, all four of us were together in the living room, me on my mother’s laptop (chatting on Facebook; they have it in Ypsilanti, too), my sister on her BlackBerry and my parents on their cell phones. My sister observed, “This is just like being anywhere.”

I visited Amy one day in Chelsea and got to see her boys and have a fresh-baked chocolate muffin. I had lunch with the aforementioned person who struck me as being a glamorous older man at 18 (when I was 16). We had an enjoyable chat. I found it extremely difficult to mentally match him up with the person I knew 30 years ago, and actually now find it rather difficult to retrieve my memories from that era: he overwrote himself.

I got to see Amy a second time, this time with Sally, too, one of my closest friends when I was seven. We had lunch downtown and then went on a walking tour of our old neighborhood. My father said we could go through our old house, still in our hands for the time being, and we did that. I’ve said “goodbye” to this house five times at this point, and I can now do it without weeping and wailing. Oh, I take that back—I did have a good cry when I happened to drive within a block of it while on my way to downtown Ann Arbor. I dream about that place two or three times a week, and it just is weird literally to drive into a dreamscape.

Thanksgiving was a vegetarian feast. My father made vegan nut roast, stuffing, gravy, Mexican bean salad (this is traditional), chocolate chip cookies, and lemon cookies; the latter required making lemon jam the day beforehand, which takes several hours. My mother made cranberry-orange relish, another dessert, and delectable dinner rolls. We had sparkling pomegranate and blueberry juice to drink. The table is kind of small, so we put the food on a cart and on the nearby kitchen counter, and placed only one special centerpiece, something that perfectly evokes the spirit of the holiday, on the table: a stick of softened butter.

After dinner, we watched Rocky Horror Picture Show. I had never seen it, to my father’s delight; it’s fun to watch a favorite movie with someone who hasn’t yet had the pleasure. I absolutely could not believe my parents even like this movie, let alone that they have seen it three or four (now four or five) times. It just didn’t seem to me like it would be their kind of thing, but one does learn something new and astounding every now and then.

After it was over, we started again at the beginning, but with English subtitles turned on, and when my mother saw the word “groin,” she said, “Is THAT what this movie is about?”

My father told us that the lemon jam he makes is so powerful in flavor, only a quarter cup is needed for a whole recipe of lemon cookies. “Do I have that recipe?” I asked.

“No, and you’re not going to,” my mother grumbled, but of course the next day, I found it waiting for me on the counter; my father had printed it out.

On Saturday I was back at the airport, gazing at my beloved water feature in the McNamara terminal. I’d been taking acidophilus all week to combat the anti-digestion properties of the antibiotics, and my father had suggested that since I did happen to be flying first class (for the only time ever), maybe I could get the flight attendants to put it in the refrigerator on the plane for the trip home. This they were not particularly happy to do, in fact, but they did it.

Hammett was thrilled to see me, and I him. I came back Saturday so I could cook on Sunday. I made green split peas and buckwheat, washed fruit, rinsed spinach for salads, and chopped veggies. I’ve gotten in the habit of treating myself to some olives from Rainbow’s olive bar on cooking day.

I called B.’s daughter, whose mother “graduated” from hospice, to say how glad I am for them, and also that I will really miss seeing B. The volunteer coordinator says that if a patient is able to leave hospice and later returns, usually they try to send the same volunteer over to visit with the person, but I can hardly hope for that. As much as I will miss her, I hope I don’t see her again for a good long time. B. left me a voice mail on my home answering machine not long ago. I will save it and listen to that scratchy, dear voice now and then.

I have a new visitee, C., whom I will meet this weekend.

I had a strangely horrible day at work on Tuesday, self inflicted, a perfect example of the adage that no good deed goes unpunished. It’s terribly cynical to believe such a thing, but I sort of do. I set out to do someone a good turn and, three or so hours later, after every possible complication, was about ready to hurl myself out the window. The person I was “helping” was extremely nice about it and reminded me, with a relaxed chuckle, that he was getting paid by the hour, in which case I really did do him a nice favor. (Come to think of it, he should send me a box of chocolates.)

I recalled a thing I had read recently in a dharma context about trying to feel the space around the discomfort, so I tried it, though my initial thought was that it wasn’t really a physical experience; the entire universe seemed drenched in misery.

Starting with something I knew I could do, I asked myself: Can I feel my feet? My hands? My calves? My lower arms? My thighs? My upper arms? The top of my head? Certainly I could feel all of those things, and by the time I’d established that, which took no time at all, I felt I might live, which was a relief.

No comments: