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Candidly Yours

Treading Water. Life in the deep end.

March 2, 2015

There are people who seem to shoot through life on a straight arrow, right from the get-go. And then there’s me.

Even in grade school it seemed to me that he rest of the world was operating with a set of instructions that had somehow completely eluded me. They cruised along at a steady clip, on a cool stream that was obviously heading some place, while most of the time, I didn’t even know how to find my way from one classroom to the next.

Metaphorically speaking, I had landed — from  birth — in the deep end of the pool and it  was all I could do to keep my nose above the line. Somewhere, along the way, I had obviously missed the life boat. I was treading water.

I remember once, when I was about seven, I found myself standing in a classroom, smack in the middle of all the fuss over something called a “recital.” Serious preparation was going on all around me, scurrying, hurrying, hair combing, mothers applying make-up and toe shoes, but I had no idea what I was doing there — absolutely no recall of what had lead-up to this moment.

It was as if I’d been been beamed into that room, a true-life non sequitur, a tiny, 35 lb alien in black leotard and pink tights with a slice of elastic a strapping down pink dance slippers.

Someone was combing back my hair and fussing over me. Rather than reveal my confusion, I just quietly went along as we were herded onto the auditorium stage and arranged ourselves into neat rows. The place was packed with happy parents. I was ‘stage left,’ at the back, in a haze of confusion.

Below us a lady was gingerly tapping out dance exercises on an upright piano. The ballet teacher was calling out instructions in a thick accent, in time with the music. She had on a flowy chiffon scarf wrapped around her waist and thighs that hardly disguised the strong possibility that she spent more time on the sofa with a bag of chips than in a studio, doing plies.

The children around me seemed to magically anticipate every next step. I was struggling to follow along unnoticed. Then,  a wave of pure empathy washed over me, snapping me into awareness. Some poor kid was about to be publicly humiliated in mid-performance. The teacher — unbelievably — was interrupting the show to correct this loser. “No! No! Noooo! Zat ees not codect. Stop now!” she commanded, punctuating each shout with a clap of her hands as she loudly stomped her way up on to the stage.

Oh no, that poor kid I thought, even as I feel a hard tug at my left leg. She was yanking my left leg into a proper turn-out.”Left! Eet ees de left leg. Out … like zees!” she barked.
Me. Oh for the love of God, I thought … it’s me.

This is how it was for me… everyone just clipping along, and then there was me, spaced out, dazed out, lost in a fog, goofy little dork on stage with the teacher holding up her big fat mistake leg for the world to see. And so it went. At six, at sixteen, all the way into to mid-life.  Absolutely clueless, treading water, trying to figure out how everyone else seemed to know how it all worked, waiting for a lifeline

Breakfast

Spoiling My Peeps

February 26, 2015

One way to make a family member feel extra special is to deliver breakfast in bed, just because.

Featured in My Daily Kitchen here is Eggs over Filet Mignon with Hollandaise Sauce, Potato Sticks, Fresh Pineapple Puree, Mocha Coffee.

Have your tray ready, nearby, set with utensils, salt & pepper & decorate with a floral or green clipping from outside.

To Begin
Potato Sticks

Cut a potato into thin sticks, keeping the peel.
Slice 1/2 a white onion into thin strips.
Sautee potatoes & onions in a tbsp. of olive oil
Sprinkle Salt & Pepper to taste.
Add a very tiny pinchof Cayenne.
Cover and sautee on medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are soft to the fork and they begin to form a crust in the pan.

While the potatoes are cooking
Begin boiling water for the eggs to poach. I like to add a tsp of white vinegar to my egg water.

As the water heats…
Toast bread or muffin of your choice. Butter lightly.
Sautee two thin cutlets of filet mignon in a bit of real butter (you could switch beef for a ham cutlet)
Now, place the warm, cooked meat atop the toasted bread, set on a plate & keep warm in the oven.

Eggs
Poach or Gently Sautee two Free-Roaming Eggs until the yolk is cream & the whites firm.
Place them carefully on top of your toast and filet arrangement.

Easy Hollandaise
In a blender (or into a beaker, using a hand mixer), crack 2 egg yolks (no whites!)
Add 3 tsp of water
Add 3 pinches of salt
Add 2 tsp of lemon juice
Blend.
In a saucepan, melt a stick of butter.
Once melted, slowly add this to the blended egg mixture.
Transfer mixture to saucepan and keep warm, on very low heat.

Putting it together
Arrange your potato sticks on your plate
Spoon a good portion of Hollandaise over each egg, garnish with a sprig of parsley
I love the combination of tomatoes with eggs. Slice up some fresh tomatoes, arrange on the place and sprinkle with a dash of salt and pepper.

Pineapple Smoothie
Blend/Puree fresh pineapple or any fruit of your choice and pour directly into a pretty glass.

Candidly Yours

Cocktail Time! Grief on a fast track

February 26, 2015

If you moved at a steady clip through all five stages of grief, getting to the other side of the loss would probably take a fair amount of time.

In my home, growing up in the ’60s, grief was managed at a faster clip.  The pace went more like from Zero to Cocktails in the time it takes to shake up a frothy whiskey sour.  Or pop a heavy barbiturate called Tuinol.  Or two Tuinols  (Two-Tus). Or slide back a Valium with a daiquiri.

As I mentioned, it was the late ’60s to early ’70s, and that’s just the way we did it.  No school psychologists, no support groups.  No worries.  Just swallow.

My experiences with death began to gather and build from an early age.  A childhood friend, Julian, died around the age of 6 from congenital liver disease which also took all his siblings.  My maternal grandmother unexpectedly dropped dead of a heart attack, I was told, as she waited to check in to the Mayo Clinic for a scheduled face lift — a whopping thirty thousand dollars, cash, stashed in her brazier. My gentle grandfather followed not far behind, and tragically on the day after my brother Nicholas’ birth.  In between these losses, and after, more fatalities landed within my reach.  In elementary school, my friend Morgan O’Brien’s sister, Hopie, was bounced out of the back of a top down convertible as it drove, 5mph, over a speed bump, pre-seatbelt days.  In the fifth grade, my friend Roberta’s mother leapt from the third story of their beautiful Greenwich mansion to her death.

Two years later, when my brother was rounding the last stretch toward his sixth birthday, and my older sister,  Madeleine, was fourteen, we were told one morning that our mother had died.  Suddenly, shockingly and mysteriously.  “Improperly medicated by an intern” we heard.  “Malpractice” was the whisper.  “Suing won’t bring her back to us” lamented our father.  My mother was, I believe, forty-one, but our father changed the dates in the obituary, making her thirty-nine; “under forty” dad said, in deference to a more cordial time when one simply did not reveal a lady’s age.  I was twelve.

I believe that the day I heard the news, or possibly the day after, I just went to school.   During the months after our mother died, my sister and I were handed, and sipped on,  the various sweet cocktails. We took the pills we were given, we played loud sad songs by Simon and Garfunkle, and we spaced out. There were, of course, casseroles for a while, and parties.  Dad dated and he worked and he also drank a lot and played “Always Something There To Remind Me” by Jose Feliciano so loud you couldn’t hear anything else in the house. And he wept out loud and in my arms and told me that he didn’t worry about me as much as the other kids because I was a lot like him so he didn’t need to worry.  And sixteen months later he was remarried.

I remember once, maybe a year later,  drinking a mini green bottle of Rolling Rock on my early morning walk to school, just to see what would happen.  My life long friend and I raided our parents’ medicine cabinets for Valium and barbiturates, which were “in”at the time and handy.  Our older sisters set us up with small, oily black chunks of hashish so thick and gooey they reminded me of  bits of licorice. These we smoked in pipes we fashioned hastily out of aluminum foil.

So it went like that. Death continued to travel through the edges of my life at a slow trot, pulling greedily to steal my remaining grandparents but also quite a few young friends. Virginia (fire); Linda, Daniel and Diane (cancer).  All these deaths were pre-AIDS era.

Given my out-sized experiences with losing loved ones, my familiarity with how to actually sidle up to and embrace the aftermath of loss and all it’s accompanying, changing pain, is astonishingly limited.

When I was in my early twenties and working in the circulation department of the Financial Times of London, my young boss, a Scarsdale girl named Randy Silverman, lost her dad.  She was so astonished by my apparent inability to connect her loss to pain, that she mentioned it to me.  I was just yammering away on her first day back to work after this devastating death in her family, maybe even whining and complaining, as if nothing had occurred. She look at me dead in the eye and said, with a perplexed expression and annoyed tone, “Elizabeth.  Do you understand I just lost my father?” I snapped momentarily into her reality with an “Oh. Sorry.”

I’m much older now, and a mother, and I handle the inevitable losses my family suffers much differently. With my son, we talk about our beloved people and special pets, now gone. We revisit and relive our memories with stories and photos. We check in with each other, without overkill — and certainly without the drugs and alcohol.  We take it bit by bit, knowing that losing someone we so dearly loved has forever  changed our lives and made our world feel less safe simply because they are no longer in it. And we remember also that our lives are fuller for having had the privilege of knowing and loving and remembering them.