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Of Course I’m Green, I’m Growing*

June 13, 2019 in Book Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Food Matters, Style Matters

Photo of me a sloppy second because I ate the salad pasta too quickly to capture it.

You can tell I’m at an impasse with my book because I’m writing to you my cooking and colors have gotten downright baroque, especially while I’m upstate, where the greens are so fresh they’re muddy. Any drive I take entails my pulling off the road to fetch fresh eggs and sun-warmed strawberries from a farmstand, treasures like a chartreuse tee and sky-blue bowl from a yard sale. So, uh, dinner tonight? What I call salad pasta–a bowl of penne and fresh herb pesto topped with peppery greens dressed with horseradish and ginger vinegar and chopped in with mint, chives, parsley, garlic scapes, strawberries (why not?) and, oy vey ist mir, smoked trout. It was pretty good but then again only strong flavors are registering to my still-sinusy sinuses. Ah, and my costume? The lady wore green–a kelly-green shawl K ferried back from his overseas adventure wrapped around a lime sarong from a street fair. As I said: baroque. But that’s the beauty of living and working alone. If you’re lucky, you can tailor to your exact specifications, which matter even when they don’t because attention is love, and love is how we grow. Really, it’s the only way.

*and other lost Erma Bombeck titles.

Kitchen Witch (Stay-at-Home Automom)

May 7, 2019 in Cat Lady Matters, Food Matters, Snapshot

I could pretend what’s pictured here is a kitchen sink salad but it’s more of a garbage pail salad. Meaning I have all kinds of motley ingredients in my fridge and I work at home and hate to throw out food. So this contains chopped blue cheese and pickles and capacollo and kale and asparagus and even a bit of chive and parsley and o shit mint. it’s fine—actually it’s pretty good, salty and fresh and filling and a little oooomami—but i’d never inflict it on anyone else.

Instead I made it after rising at 5 am to revise yesterday’s book pages and then write the film lecture I’m delivering later today out on Long Island. Before editing said lecture, I worked out in the gym recently installed in our basement while doing laundry in our building’s new washer and dryer. (Anything to seduce Williamsburg tenants during 15 months of a modified L Train.) I felt so glamorous doing all this in my own building, on my own time. Herein lies the strange beauty of living and working alone–a spiky, highly singular economy within which I feel most myself. I’m even more grateful for it lately because your support showed me how not-alone I really am. (PS I’m back in book, finally.)

More Lipstick for the Wolf

March 23, 2019 in Age Matters, Astro Matters, Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Food Matters

Lately, I spend my Saturdays reading.

I have read five books by Ruth Reichl, wonderful stories of travel and food and champagne and love. I have read all three of L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon books, which, as Natasha Lyonne avers, are better if grimmer than the Anne of Green Gable series: more honest, higher stakes. Also I have reread Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage and Black Swans. And of course all of MFK Fisher.

Especially How to Cook a Wolf.

It does not escape me that all these books are by and about women writers who found love and literary success.

For the moment, both evade me. I say “for the moment” because I am relentlessly hopeful in my own way. Though my romances have conferred as much pain as pleasure, I still look forward to the next one.

And though I have yet to sell my book–yet to finish it, even–I see its cover before I go to sleep at night. Sometimes on someone else’s night table.

In the meantime I keep my scale very, very small. Frankly, I’m too broke to go out. I have no money to spend and though an affordable New York still lurks beneath the city’s Instagram ops and best-of lists, I find myself weary and wary when faced with the prospect of restaurants and bars. Friends invariably pick up the checks and it hurts to burden them. This is not how I like to live. This is not how I like to treat my people.

In my home I can take care of business. I rise early and write as long as my brain will let me, then go for a long walk, the neighborhood quiet in the mid-afternoon. I shop the grocery sales and cook slowly as the sun ripens in the horizon. I cook because it is cheaper than eating or ordering out but also because the rhythm of stirring, chopping, stirring–knife thumping, oil sizzling, sauce thickening– feels elegant and serene. The way I felt before the Legend smiled at me and I smiled back. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy