Talking to my Mother

 Every Sunday for the last twenty years of her life, until the week she died, I would call my mother to chat. It didn't matter if I was at home or on a journey, Sunday was my day to call Mom. Sometimes the calls were short, just a couple of minutes, but it was a kind of ritual for me (and probably for Mom as well) that I enjoyed. 

I didn't have a warm and fuzzy relationship with my mother growing up.  Indeed, there were times when I couldn't stand her and wouldn't talk to her for months. But once she was in her late 70's and I was in my late 40's, neither of us had any use for the old parent-child dynamic and so we could simply chat.  Like adults.

During the end of the 20th century and the first decade of this century I was fortunate to be able to travel a lot. I went to Europe every year, sometimes twice. Airlines were competitive and thus there was a lovely interlude when airfares were very cheap. Non-stop round-trip flights from San Francisco to Paris could be found for under $300.  Small hotels might set you back $35 - $50 per night, especially when each country had its own currency, before the arrival of the euro.  There was no reason not to travel and I loved every minute of it.

Mom always liked my Sunday calls but she loved it when I was out of the country. Many of those calls were made from phone booths, using a phone card purchased at a tobacco shop. I have a great memory of standing by the side of a small, local road in Lipari, an island off the coast of Sicily, having just finished hiking up the side of a dormant (but still alive) volcano, wreaking of sulphur smell from the plumes of  sulphur smoke coming out of the volcano.  It was a sunny day, I was hot and sweaty but eager to share my adventure with Mom.

When I traveled to Vietnam I would call Mom from my hotel phone at 6:00 a.m. because the 15 hour time difference meant I would catch her before she went to sleep for the night. She was amazed and a bit nervous that I was in Vietnam alone and my calls opened up a portal for her, a new way to look at a country that we all felt wary of and guilty about.

Istanbul, Tunisia, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Amsterdam, Bruges, Lisbon, the Azores Islands...... so many different  cities and countries and so many phone booths.  Every single time I would call, Mom's first question would be: "Where are you today?"

It is Sunday, today. Maybe it's because I haven't traveled anywhere in two years, longer than that for being in Europe, but memories of those calls are swirling around me today. Maybe it's because I wish I could still speak with her or maybe it's simply a good memory I have of my mother. Whatever the reason, it makes me wish there was a phone booth at the corner of my block. It makes me want to hear that question again: "Where are you today?"  It definitely makes me wish I was somewhere else.

Philosophy of Old Age

 When does Old Age begin?  When one is 30, it seems like it would begin at 60.  When one is 60, perhaps 72.  Maybe when one gets to be 80 and is still coherent that person could argue that it never begins. Or it began a long time ago and who cares?

I am 71 and a half. I don't feel old, except sometimes and that's pretty much just physical stuff that happens when you get old: tired muscles, creaky joints, arthritis, dry skin, runny nose. Maybe the physical complaints shouldn't define Old Age. But they do.  Along with the slowly waning mental acuity and the ready acknowledgement that death is no longer an abstract. 

Therefore, I am in the Old Age period of my life.  The question is this: what comes after Old Age and before Death?  Really Old Age?  I don't have an answer, nor do I want one.  It's bad enough to be in the Old Age category.  Let's just all acknowledge that what comes next is the Terminator: Death. So what if Old Age is the obvious precursor to Death?  We all knew it would arrive at some time, so it needs no introduction and there is no illusion about it all. We are here now. We will die.  Let's move on.

But being in this age group doesn't mean giving in and dying. If anything it means the opposite. I feel far from death and most people I know do as well. So my philosophy of Old Age is simple:  fuck it all.  Acknowledge the aches and pains and the waning mental acuity but, at the same time, kick ass, don't whine, drink wine, and go out and have a jolly good time.  Everyone dies. Why worry about it? Stay happy and healthy and listen to good music. 

What a lame-ass blog this is.  But I am posting it nonetheless.

Dry January? HA-HA-HA!!!

 Please note that I am not talking about the weather here.  I am talking about that unnatural phenomenon that some people voluntarily embrace this time of the year: abstaining from alcohol for the month of January.  Thus "Dry January."  

One must think that the person who started this alarming trend had a really bad Holiday Season. No doubt from Thanksgiving until New Years Day this person was tipsy, drunk or hung over every day.  I mean: Every. Single. Day.  Then on January 1st this person thought "Oh my god, this must stop. For the next thirty days I am not drinking. My liver and kidneys will die otherwise."  And that person stopped drinking, at least for a week.

Fast forward several years: "Dry January" becomes a cultural thing. People feel righteous about their commitment to a month of sobriety, like it's going to do them a world of good. They will lose weight!  Their skin tone will improve! Their children and friends will like them once again! Their boss will give them a raise or they will win the lottery! Anything is possible with this self-imposed sort of flagellation. Come February 3rd, all that lost weight has been found back on their body, no one likes them any better than they did a month ago, no raise is forthcoming and the lottery..... well, let's just say that dream was like melting ice in a shot glass. Gone and done.

Listen: January is a tough month. Why stop drinking in a month that gives us so much pain: cold, gray, wet days (which I love, by the way), credit card bills from all the crap we bought for Christmas gifts, more Covid variants and a chance to get very sick, ten extra pounds because of the pound of See's Candy consumed on December 28th, resolutions that didn't even last a week, gifts that need to be returned to stores that are cesspools of germs and so many more negative factors.  This is when we need a drink!  This month fortification is necessary just to survive.  If you want to stop drinking for a month, pick a happy month, like April or October. Those months have flare and promise and new seasons. January has nothing except depression, debt and over-indulged dietary concerns. 

Of course, since I have almost zero social life, I don't have that Thanksgiving-to-New Year's problem of too many parties, too many cocktails with friends.  I have zero parties and zero cocktails with friends during the jovial Holiday Season.  (I do have a lot of cocktails, but they are with myself.) Come January, I have not been hung over, nor have I over-indulged (well, except for that pound of See's Candy) in anything except toasted, salted, spicy nuts and hummus.  And let me tell you that overindulging in hummus will never get you in trouble.  No DUI for hummus, that's for sure!

So my January is not dry. It is not a monsoon, either, just so you know. I am not upending bottles of alcohol at a rapid pace but I do continue to have my cocktail(s) at 5:15 every evening.  And then some wine, and then some more and maybe a nightcap and a sleep aid in the form of another nightcap. I sleep well and peacefully, secure in the knowledge that my Dry Month will come sometime in the next ten years, when my social life has picked up and I am out drinking, dancing and dining with friends and my liver needs a break so I will willfully stop drinking for a month week few days.

Yeah. Sure. 

Here's looking at you, kid.  Cheers!

Cooking for oneself

 Cooking for one person is not as fun as cooking for someone else, but there are advantages: you can do it whenever you want, the criticism is all yours, no one complains about the details. You can experiment, you can combine recipes and ingredients in clever and unusual ways and if you don't like it, you can toss it in the trash and have Triscuits and goat cheese for dinner, which is always a delicious meal.  If you make something really good it is sort of sad that no one is there to share it but since that happens somewhat rarely it isn't really a deterrent to solitary cooking. 

However, the one big negative about cooking for yourself is the clean-up.  If you cook for someone else, or many others, you can often wrangle someone into helping you with the mess.  Or if you leave the mess for a while, someone usually starts to feel guilty and they at least do some triage in the dirty kitchen. This NEVER happens when you cook for yourself. The mess is yours. Sure, you can ignore it for the evening and then look at it in the morning, which is so incredibly sad and disgusting that it happens rarely in my tiny home. 

Some people are neat cooks. They clean up as they go, pop things into the dishwasher (a dishwasher!  What a concept!) and get dinner on the table without the kitchen looking like a small, localized tornado ran through it.  I am not a neat cook. I am a slobby cook. Small bits of parsley or garlic or ginger are always lurking about. Those little papers from onions (I believe they are known as 'onion skins') seems to always be on my kitchen floor, with garlic papers as well. If flour is involved there are always patches of what can only be described as "scabs" on the kitchen counter, hard little rough-edged bits stuck on until one scrapes them off. My cooking top is an electro-magnetic thing, smooth as glass (because it is a kind of glass) and thus shows every tiny drop of everything, and looks pathetically sloppy once cooking (or even boiling water) begins.

Is it no wonder that I sometime opt for eating nothing for dinner, except the above mentioned Triscuits and cheese?  (I prefer the little thin ones, by the way.) Yes, there will be Triscuit crumbs and cheese detritus but it's a lot simpler to clean up that mess than wet and dry and chopped and grated and strained things. Even making a simple salad means some oil and acid will be dribbling somewhere.

There is no solution to this problem because I live alone and plan on doing so until the End of Days. However, I can see my eating habits getting whittled down the older I get.  There will be no canned soup or canned chili but there will be plenty of hard-cooked eggs on toast (with mayo) and I will bite the bullet and make batches of food, like pasta sauce and chili, soup and bread, cookies and ice cubes, and store them in freezer bags so all I need to do is thaw them out and heat and eat.  (In the case of cookies, that's not even necessary: frozen cookies are wonderfully tasty!)  Of course the ice cubes will remain frozen at all times. One must have one's cocktail before diving into the plethora of frozen goodies.  Or maybe, just maybe, a really nice restaurant will appear in my neighborhood that has good take-out and I can indulge in that now and then.

Tonight I am making a soup..... combining two recipes, using homemade chicken broth, some sort of coconut-curry-spicy-chicken soup with rice noodles, spinach and a large glass of white wine. It will be okay. It will be warming and tasty (I hope) and filling. And I will put off the cleaning until it's bedtime..... and acknowledge that solitary cooking is like solitary living: there are ups and downs, goods and bads, but these are my choices and I am sticking to them.

Apocalyptic Food

 By that I mean food you WANT when the apocalypse finally arrives.  Yes, everyone will have their own favorite things to eat before the Zombies devour them or before the Comet From Space makes the earth nonexistent. This is my choice.  It is a caramelized cheesy onion dip thing that I made for xmas eve. It is perfect. It is delicious. (And yes, it is loaded with fat and calories, but it's the Apocalypse for goodness sake!)  It keeps for a week in the fridge and is not exotic. It is heaven in your mouth.  It can be a dip or a spread or a filling for celery sticks or a topping for a burger or a chicken breast.  You can eat it with carrots, on toast or just lick it off your fingers. It can be anything you want it to be because it needs to exist in your life.

Think about it: slow cooked onions, a lot of them, melted down into a sweet, gooey mess. Then mixed with good Gruyere cheese, sour cream, cream cheese, a bit of mayo, pepper, red pepper flakes.... and then baked. Baked with some crunchy toasted panko or toasted bread crumbs. Hot and bubbly and gooey and incredible. If some creature or some meteor is going to fucking kill me, I want this, along with some seared foie gras and a hundred dollar bottle of French Sancerre to be my last bites on this planet.  It is that good.

Where does one get this, you ask. You make it. Yes, you buy the ingredients and you put it together. If that's too much work for you then you deserve to be eaten by those bloody narcissistic apocalyptic creatures, whoever or whatever they might be.

I hate sharing recipes but I am going to share this with the three people who might read this. (Do not share it with others.)  Keep in mind that the proportions don't need to be exact. A bit less cheese, fine. A bit more cream cheese, great. I left off the cheese on the top, figuring correctly that it would be better without it. But the crunchy crumbs are like gravy: not necessary but worth every moment of prep.  Just toast some panko in a little olive oil until golden and use that. Or toasted sourdough bread crumbs, real ones, not ones you buy in a cardboard can, would be perfect.

Have at it. Tell me all about it when you make it. It is from Bon Appetit, obviously.  I wish I could say I created it, but alas, no.

https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/creamy-french-onion-dip

Yeah, yeah, the holidays

 There's nothing to say about the holidays because my holidays are not your holidays and so my report would be boring and of little interest to anyone else. At least that's what I think. Who wants to read or listen about someone else's traditions?  It's fine for a few minutes and then your attention drifts because, honestly, what one person loves is often dull and moronic to someone else.  Why would anyone care if I love to eat fresh crab with my kids on Christmas Eve? Everyone I know and love already knows that's what I do, so writing about it is trite. Doing nothing for New Year's Eve is what pretty much everyone does so there's nothing new about that. 

However, one thing that was rather nice was spending two nights in a lovely hotel in Mendocino, courtesy of John and Diane, with the kids and all our dogs. I don't know anyone else who gets to do that. It was a great start to a slow, plodding holiday season. I could go back and do it again tomorrow.

Not to be depressing but a lot of famous people died in the last two weeks, something that doesn't often happen in Holiday Time.  Most important to me was Joan Didion, probably my favorite writer. I have been reading her essays and books for about 50 years and will start re-reading them for the fourth or fifth or tenth time. John Madden also died; I am not even a mediocre football fan but I did like Madden. He at least made commentary fun. He seemed like a nice man, too.

Betty White died, she was funny and silly and a lot of people were big fans of hers. Stephen Sondheim also left us, as did Desmond Tutu and Bob Dole.  And still thousands died of Covid.  December deaths are not what one thinks about when the word "holiday" comes up but there you have it.  

Bottom line, I hope you all had a great, exciting, dramatic and profitable holiday season. Now we are done with it all, just need to pack away the few xmas ornaments that were taken out to create some kind of holiday cheer and that will be that. 

Ho-Ho. Hum.

Angels in the Architecture

 Lately I have been thinking about dead people. Not just people I once knew in real-life but dead people in general. Their spirits, mostly. What happens to our spirit, our "soul" if that sounds better to you, after we die?  No one knows, of course, no one even knows if we have a spirit or a soul or if we are just matter. Our spirit wouldn't be matter, of course, but maybe it is our consciousness because no one can really put their finger on what physically constitutes consciousness. 

There's no specific reason this has been on my mind now; it is on my mind most of the time. Like some people I know, I talk to dead people quite often. Something happens, like I see a group of does and fawns and I say "Oh, Mom check that out!  I know you always liked deer, so look at those!"  I say this out loud, of course.  Once you begin to equate actions and situations with a now-dead person, it is amazing how often the connections are there. Something will remind me of my Dad, my Mom, my friend Martha, and once I comment on it to them, more and more things occur that remind me of them.  Or I think about John Prine for a second and in another second there's a John Prine song playing on the radio or on Pandora, just randomly.

I don't know if others out there experience this, but it gives me faith and belief that some spirits stick around us and are listening to us.  Sometimes they help us out (Thank you, St. Anthony) and sometimes they come to us for comfort or to assuage loneliness or to make us open our eyes to a bit of wonder or beauty. The flower stream I presented this past year on Instagram, posting a single flower each day for 9 months, gave me a temporary reprieve from some of the ugliness of the world. And I felt like my personal spirits were helping.....beautiful flowers presented themselves to me in odd, unexpected ways and I got to share those with anyone who was looking. 

I currently work in a small hotel that has been in existence for close to 100 years. There are stately redwoods on the property, old-growth hydrangeas and camellias and dahlias that are six feet tall.  And there are spirits on that property, benign spirits that exude peace and tranquility. You can feel it when you walk around the property, a feeling of calm and peaceful resignation and hope. I've never worked at a place that felt so safe and accommodating and I am 100% sure it's due to those old, dead souls who still hang around because it was their special place when they were alive.  

Nothing profound here, just my mind rambling on.