FUN

What sounds like fun?

When I was unencumbered by marriage and family, fun was

  • Dancing until totally sweaty, never getting exhausted
  • Making out
  • Driving around looking for fun
  • And you know what the above fun refers to
  • Eating carbs with no concern at all for ramifications
  • Doing scary things, but not quite THAT scary, above ^
  • Putting on elaborate eye makeup
  • Staying up late, laughing with friends
  • Sleeping in
  • Knowing the words to all of the Bob Dylan songs
  • Hiking
  • That’s a lie; I have never thought hiking was fun
  • Being in college
  • Dating lots of men (in my case, “lots” is less than a dozen)
  • Not needing Spanx
  • Talking on the phone for hours
  • Macaroni and cheese in a box

Now that I am way into my golden years, fun is a whole other thing:

  • Wearing sweatpants
  • Eating toast
  • Texting instead of long winded phone conversations
  • Door Dash
  • Napping
  • Laughing with friends, but they go home at nine
  • Staying at home and not wearing makeup
  • A new pair of Birkenstocks
  • A new knee brace
  • Binge-ing tv shows all by myself
  • Napping
  • Pedicures
  • Comparing surgeries with friends
  • No longer having to buy tampons
  • Napping
  • Being alive
  • Having grandchildren
  • Popcorn for lunch
  • Napping

DINNER

These days, if it is time for dinner and I make it, you don’t want to eat it. I have written about this before. My husband is the chef now.

The other night, I had found a recipe for “Cream Cheese Chicken,” which sounded delicious. It featured the cream cheese, along with white wine, dill, and chicken broth added to the chicken with some other stuff. I thought it looked relatively easy. To serve under it, I got some Rice A Roni, (The San Francisco Treat). It was nostalgic for me, as I used to make it all the time when I was the cook. Back in the day, when the dinners I made were totally nutritious and almost delicious.

The cream cheese chicken was much more laborious than it looked like on paper. It took Charlie over an hour to make, and in the process, he used at least three pots and every spatula we have, not to mention the measuring cups, mixing bowls, and utensils.

It was a triumph, really. Charlie’s cooking skills are now way up there. The sauce with the dill enhanced the delicate flavor of the chicken. There was also broccolini and salad.

When dinner was over, Charlie, as he snuffed out the candles, remarked “You know, Rice A Roni is complicated to make.”

RICE A RONI.

https://www.thekitchn.com/cream-cheese-chicken-recipe-23281115

 

 

MY FOOT AT FOUR A.M.

What do people with insomnia do?

They get up, wander around the house, and sit alone in the dark, hoping that somehow, sleepiness will overcome them.

When that doesn’t happen, they scroll through their phone, look at all the Instagram photos, move over to places like Twitter, read stuff about the coming election, and fall into despair.

Then, if you are me, you turn your photo app on, and you take a shot like the one above.

Then you go back to bed and try to imagine what sleep is like.

IMPORTANT JOBS

This person most likely has a very important job. He’s a “stock” photo, but there are lots of people like this out there. Men and women who are decision makers, carriers of stress, makers of policy, and savers of lives.

I watch them on TV all the time. They wear Apple Watches, get into buildings using their fingerprints, and they eat standing up. They have drivers so they can do business on the way to work, because they live in huge cities with lots of traffic, so they use their time commuting wisely–getting ready to transplant organs, save a species, or control the markets of foreign countries. Some of them cause wars. Others stop them, or try to.

Here’s the thing about these people that I wonder. They probably don’t go home for long stretches, but when they are home, what do they do? Do they put on their pajamas the minute they walk in the door? Or do they have a brown drink poured into a crystal glass splashed from a cut glass decanter? Do they eat Cheetos ever? I know Taylor Swift makes pop tarts, but do any of the others  make their own snacks?

Do important people stay on alert all the time? Can they relax? How do they do this? I can’t imagine an important person taking a nap, for instance. They would keep getting interrupted by their phones binging. Do they ever do crafts? They must have the ability to immerse themselves in something that will take them out of themselves so completely that they can just focus on that thing and let the rest of the world go. So. I wonder if Bill Gates has ever used a pot holder loom.

Wouldn’t it be sort of great to be so important that you could see a problem and just pick up the phone and call another important person and get it solved, right on the spot? This must happen all the time, but we are just not aware of it, because we are not very important.

I would just once like to be so important that I could decide, for instance, that there should be more equality at the doctor’s office, and if they weigh you, you ought to be able to weigh the doctor. Who could I call to make that happen?

But actually, I am glad I am not important. I just don’t have the wardrobe for it.

PLATING

When you go to a restaurant, they serve you food that not only tastes good, but it is aesthetically arranged on the plate. This food styling is important. The above photo is of a gorgeous dinner. As I am writing this, the photo looks a little blurry, but that may be because my cataract surgery isn’t for another month.

The meal above was made and plated by my husband, who follows the directions on the meal subscription box faithfully, right down to making the food on the plates look exactly like the photo on the recipe. Exactly.

We subscribe to three meal boxes per week. This means that three meals are delicious, look just like what Ina Garten would make, and I don’t have to make anything. Unfortunately, the other four meals are my responsibility. I have been making dinners for 54 years. For 48 of those years, the. meals were mostly good. They were always totally edible. But here’s the thing: I have never liked cooking. I took my responsibility for producing meals seriously, as I had two children to keep healthy and growing. We had salad at every dinner.

Once the kids left, what little enthusiasm I had for making supper dwindled to near zero. I began to rely on a few “no brainers.” Spaghetti with Rao’s sauce. Sandwiches. Turkey pot pies. Pizza delivery. After a few years of this, my husband became weary of the same old meals. I became angry at him for this, and so I announced my retirement from the daily grind. We subscribed to the meal boxes and he took over cooking on those nights. Those nights are heavenly, because we get dinners like “Turkish Goulash with Lime Rice,” “Tostadas with Guacamole and Lime Crema,”  “Roasted Garbanzo Beans with Artisanal Salad,” and the like. Many of the recipes include various sorts of beans, but we don’t mind. The fiber helps the meals “move along,” if you catch my drift.

My nights are a totally different kettle of fish. I use that phrase advisedly, since I am not a fish fan, so I don’t make fish. Except tuna salad sandwiches, which are always good. I have no culinary imagination, I resent being in the kitchen, and thus when putting the food on the plates, I just schlep it on there, with no thought to the presentation. Presentation be damned; let’s just eat the food and be done with it.

Night before last, I watched as my husband held a sprig of parsley over his head and dropped it gracefully onto the side of a portion of Poached Chicken Breasts with Lemon Sauce. It was beautiful. He took such care and pride.

The next night, it was my turn.

 

FALL

The change of seasons gives us a jolt that we need. Summer is over, although it is still so damn hot out, but we have to blame climate change for that. Fall is fall, no matter what the temps are. So everybody in the burbs buys mums and pumpkins. We look forward to wearing sweaters (I don’t–since menopause, I wonder how any woman can wear one; they are so HOT). The other things people do in fall:

  • Make all sorts of recipes utilizing squash
  • Wear socks with their Birkenstocks
  • Think about roasting a chicken
  • Get one last pedicure
  • Consider growing a beard
  • Take the kids to get lost in a corn maze
  • Ride around looking for “the foliage”
  • Try mulled cider one more time, but it’s still awful
  • Order an inflatable figure
  • Break a tooth on a candy apple
  • Sit around a fire pit, even if it’s 70 degrees out there
  • Put nuts in a bowl with a nutcracker, yet nobody eats them
  • Trip on a root while hiking
  • Make chili
  • Stock up on lip balm
  • Stop shaving their legs
  • Visit a “haunted house”

Next up, winter. The season we love until the holidays, and then it just gets depressing…

 

THEN AND NOW

Old houses. They are full of character, they hold stories in their walls. They have drafts. Bats can get in. But they are built from a time when craftsmen took pride in their work. Walls were thick, floors were beautiful wood. Big, Santa friendly fireplaces. Large rooms.

We lived in an old house for thirty years. The center hall, wide and welcoming, was big enough for actual furniture. The kitchen had a kitchen table, not an island. It had a butler’s pantry. It was such a superb home for raising a family. We loved that house.

It had drawbacks. The laundry was in the gloomy basement. Two flights of stairs down, and then back up again, lugging the heavy basket of clothes. The closets were small, and nobody in 1912 thought that folks needed to “walk in” to a closet. Some of the windows were painted shut. House cleaning was a day long affair; it was a big, old place. Dust. So much dust. But it was homey, lovely, and our family dropped roots there.

Now we, the elder empty nesters, live on the top floor of a brand new apartment building. We had no idea how much easier it would be to live in a modern place. There are no drafts. The laundry room is off my closet–no lugging! For the first time in my life, I have a huge kitchen island, so much counter space. I can walk in to my closet, and dance in there if I want to. The windows in every room are gigantic. The sunsets we see from our living room are spectacular– high above the city–pink, orange, and purple. We never saw a sunset at the old place; there were too many trees.

There is a skyline! I always wanted to look out and see a skyline! We have a big balcony, so I have flowers, but there is no lawn maintenance. We can walk to restaurants. We can watch the Dayton Dragons baseball games from the balcony. Fourth of July fireworks are incredible.

We know lots of people who still live in their family homes. As they age, the prospect of moving to a smaller place seems overwhelming. Too much stuff to get rid of. All of that packing up. Selling a house. So they sigh and hope that their children will be fine doing all of that “when the time comes.” They stay put until perhaps the moving won’t be an adventure, but instead a miserable relocation to a “facility.”

We are so glad we decided to have an “adventure” by moving from the burbs into the city. It was a life refresher. We have new friends, a diverse group of neighbors, and did I mention the sunsets?

Get out of that house, empty nesters! Before it’s too late.

 

HARRIET

Harriet Busby spent her entire life doing the right thing. As a child, she spit her cherry pits demurely into her napkin, and then placed them at the side of her plate. When her brother let the cherry pits accumulate in his hand, Harriet tattled on him. Harriet was not afraid of reprisal.

When Harriet grew up, she found the habits of her neighbors shocking. Harold Batts left his garbage cans out in the open, and this resulted in a raccoon infestation. Harriet called Critter Control so many times they recognized her voice.  Her backdoor neighbor, Winnie Smales, left the bathroom curtains open. Harriet was forced to inform Winnie that her *ahem* privates were not so private.

Harriet never married. She came close with Robert Dodd, but he had the unfortunate habit of sucking on a toothpick after dinner, and that was a dealbreaker for Harriet. When they dissolved their relationship, Harriet got rid of the jade green ceramic toothpick holder that adorned her kitchen window sill. She never really liked it, and it was not at all valuable. She chucked it, along with the toothpicks, into the trash without a second thought. However, she did miss Robert’s company in the evenings. After dinner especially, when Robert would sing “Are You Lonesome Tonight” in a soothing baritone.

Harriet could never understand why her nieces never sent thank you notes for the ten dollar checks she sent them on their birthdays, so she stopped sending them. Their father, Thomas, who was six years Harriet’s junior (guilty of the cherry pit etiquette breach), left Harriet a huffy message on her land line, declaring thank you notes extinct. He told his sister that “text” thanks are what is done these days, but since Harriet didn’t believe in cell phones, she was the one in the wrong.

Harriet remained steadfast. The world was full of ill mannered, selfish people. Harriet stuck to her guns, judging those in her neighborhood, at church, and especially those churls at Kroger who banged Harriet’s heels with their shopping carts.

Then, one Saturday, after a solitary Friday night in her recliner, Harriet had a Eureka moment. Life was getting shorter and shorter, Harriet was getting older and older, and the lonely days and nights stretching in front of her turned her blood to ice.

Harriet looked at herself in the mirror. Pale, undistinguished. Hair that barely held a curl. The beginnings of under eye bags. Were those jowls? She stifled a sigh, pulled open the hall closet door, and took out her maroon cardigan.

The speed limit was 35 mph, but Harriet floored it on the way to the Goodwill store, where she bought a brass toothpick holder.

The rest is history.

 

EVERYBODY HAS SEX

I have two daughters, so it is widely accepted that their parents have had sex twice.

As a novelist, I have considered inserting (poor choice of words) a sex scene or two into my work. I have not done this.

This is because I have actually, like everyone in the world over a certain age, had sex more than twice. So I have experienced enough “things” that would allow me to write a scene about intimacy. I have not done this.

I have not done this in fear that three of my readers might a) vomit after reading one of these scenes, or b) in the case of reader number three, wonder where on earth the activities in said scene originated. I know, fiction writers use their imagination, but would reader three really understand that?

My problems in writing the scene would entail (not an intentional pun)

  • Arranging the location for the scene. Would it be inside? A hotel, or maybe someone’s seedy basement? Or would it be somewhere in the glory of the outdoors, say along the banks of a pebble-strewn stream or in a bosky dell?
  • Would the participants be young and lithe, or more in my age range, complete with arthritis, cellulite, various sagging parts, etc.?
  • Would it be an affair? If so, an air of stealth and anxiety at being discovered  would have to be a part of it. The anxiety could cause erectile dysfunction, and frankly, I don’t want to go down that road.
  • What kind of sex would they have? Vanilla (I am a sort of expert in that area of carnal activity), or more kinky? I have read other writer’s sex scenes involving props. Toys. I have to admit that everything in a brown wrapper coming to me has been from Amazon. I would have to do some research into “toys.” Again, I am not sure I am ready for that.
  • And the act itself. Arms, legs, faces, buttocks. How does one write about the arrangement? Sex involves a lot of thrashing and sometimes it’s very unruly. Sweat and other liquids. One participant might be into biting. Biting what? Oh, and foreplay. Where should I have them start? In the hallway of the hotel? By the pool, very surrepticiously?
  • Who faces in what direction? Arms caressing cheeks or hands exploring inside underwear? How do they get their clothes off? And then what?  Will one of the lovers swoon, or will one pass gas? That stuff happens. The act itself–discuss or leave it up to the reader, to fill in as desired? How explicit is too explicit?
  • Do I want to sweep my readers into the scene to the point that they lose themselves and emerge at the end of the chapter sweaty and exhausted, or uplifted and deeply moved?
  • And will they reach nirvana simultaneously, as they do in just about all romance novels, or will one partner become delirious and the other resentful?

It’s something that I never have come to grips with (another innuendo I didn’t mean) as a novelist, and thus I write what many classify as “young adult” fiction.

This is a complete cop-out on my part, because who is it that is having all the sex? Yup. The young adults.

I think Colleen Hoover can handle this. I am going to end it with her.

 

WHO DONE IT?

After dinner, we settle down to watch TV. We don’t watch anything that is on network TV. We prefer the mystery series that are on the streaming. You know the ones–they surround a crime, usually murder, and they have at least six episodes.

It requires two people to watch these, because these shows are so crammed with red herrings, a cast of thousands, and so many blind alleys. This is how our evenings in front of the TV go:

HIM: “Wait. Pause it for a minute. Who’s Larry?

ME: “Larry is Maurice’s brother.”

HIM: “The one with the false eye?”

ME: “No. That is Tony. You know–Tony runs the coffee shop. Larry is Mary’s father.”

HIM: “So they think Larry did it? I thought he had an alibi. He was eating pizza with Don and his wife–what’s her name? Violet?”

ME: “Larry’s alibi may be shaky. He is sleeping with Violet, so she is probably lying for him.”

The show continues, and we watch as some new characters emerge, and a plot detail from the first episode comes up big time. Neither of us remembers it.

ME: “Wait. The mailbox??”

HIM: *rewinding* “See that? She put a letter in the mailbox.”

ME: “Who? The next door neighbor?”

HIM: “Yeah.”

ME: “So she is important to all of this? Is she a suspect? Wasn’t she the one who moved back to London in the first episode? I thought she was just Violet’s roommate from college.”

HIM: “Yes, but she must be important. Maybe the letter has incriminating facts in it.”

ME: “Or maybe not. She could just be mailing a letter.”

HIM: “Is this the show where the girl got raped on roofies?”

ME: “No wonder you are confused. No. That was the last show–the one with the body in the lake beside the boy’s boarding school.”

HIM: “Oh, right. This is about the poisoning.”

ME: “Yeah. So maybe the letter is a flashback. Or, maybe the letter has the poison.”

Why we watch these is the real mystery, because number one: the guilty person is always the one you least suspect, so just pick the most ridiculous cast member, and you will be right ninety percent of the time. Remember Tony, with the false eye? HE did it. The fact that he appears in the first episode for exactly three seconds is the giveaway. Who would guess Tony? We would. But wait, is it Tony??

Number two: The same famous actors, like Olivia Coleman, are in all of these shows, so we get confused. Olivia was the good true woman in the last show we watched, and then she is in a show  sending nasty letters to everyone in the village. We just can’t keep it straight–is she the good one or the bad one?

Of course, there is always the plot twist. Or worse. Tony, whose eye gives us the creeps, turns out to be a former priest. A man of God, who just looks like someone who might be a murderer. The actual murderer is Violet, whom we would have never suspected, because she has such a small role. They elevate her in the last episode, when she tries to push DCI Bradley off the roof, because he is on to her for murdering Ralph with the poison. Ralph, the seemingly innocuous schoolteacher.

After the last episode, we both shrug. We knew it was coming. The person you least suspect.

HIM: “But what was in the letter? It wasn’t poison, because Violet kept the poison in her purse in that little bottle. What was the letter all about?”

ME: “Something unimportant. They wanted us to get confused.”

HIM: *nods wisely* “Of course. Remember the brother in the chicken suit? THAT WAS CONFUSING.”

ME: “That wasn’t in this show.”

HIM: “I know that. But it was still confusing.”

We turn off the TV, shut off the lights, and go to bed. Just before he starts snoring, I sit bolt upright.

ME: “But wait! Violent and Tony were both threatened by the London mafia! Violet murdered  Ralph to protect Tony! Ralph was mafia; remember the black gloves? They were setting us up for Season Two!”

HIM: “The chicken suit was so confusing…”