April 16, 2009 - Yesterday was lunch at Diner  before a meeting at a friend’s in Williamsburg.   I had every intention of being good - greens and grains, thank you very much. But once again, oh how they make it hard.  Capital “H” style. Does “grassfed” count? - if the cow eats the grass and I eat the cow, well come on now… it must count for something.  But it doesn’t matter, I went for The Kentucky Hot Brown anyway.  There was mention of tomato.  

I’m reading the New York Times waiting for my dish to arrive, Dining section first, and get myself caught up in John T. Edge’s article about frozen biscuits.  Here’s R.L. Constantine, a Mobile, Alabaman with a confession: “Marshall’s biscuits pretty much saved me during my widower years… Those little freezer biscuits, made right here, held me over until I met my new wife.”  I forget sometimes. I take for granted the power that a biscuit can have.  Hot, with butter, and there’s the balm. Sunday mornings at my father’s parents’, homesick for my mom at the end of the weekend-long visit, I remember waiting at the table, small in my nightgown, watching my own grandmother make sausage gravy from scratch and fry eggs two at a time.  Was it Grand Ol’ Opry or Kung Fu Theater on TV in the next room?  - grandfather silent and waiting in his easy chair out there, already smoking Camel straights and a coffee on the side table.  The biscuits were in the oven.  With a whack against the counter, my grandmother would pop open the tube of Pillsbury biscuits and pluck them out one by one and onto the pan.  She made no apologies for the shortcut.  Perhaps, as a born and raised Kentuckian, it was simply in her blood.  In Edge’s article I discovered that, “Canned biscuit and roll dough was invented in the South in 1931, when Lively Willoughby of Louisville, KY at Ballard & Ballard Company, patented the pressurized foil sleeve process that Pillsbury later merchandised.”  There in Illinois, I lived with my mother, in the next town, two blocks from the Pillsbury plant.  God how I loved those biscuits.

The three of us sat there, the sound of forks against plates more common than our own voices, silence so pronounced we could hear each other chewing.  We were strangers to each other really. But the biscuit plate passed from each of us to the other stood somehow for our shared need for comfort.  A need even greater in that awkwardness of each other’s company.

Near-perfect timing: I’m at the end of Edge’s article and out comes my food.  It looked like something my grandmother might have thought a little snooty, a little too haughty.  It looked fantastic.  Pieces of sliced baguette topped with delectable ham, slices of bacon, a rich and yummy Mornay sauce, those two cooked tomatoes as promised, and boy-oh-boy…  For that period of time that my fork is scooping my Kentucky Hot Brown bite after bite into my mouth, I don’t care that I had a late night last night.  I don’t care that I barely slept.  I don’t care that I have a long day and heavy lifting ahead of me.  I don’t care that it’s fattening and creamy.  It’s good.  It’s all good.

I think for a second that maybe I’m so easily sated, so easily made all warm and glowy because, honestly, my “problems,” those things I need rescue from, aren’t (relatively) that big of a deal.  That sure, a tasty meal is fix enough. But then I think of Raymond Carver’s short story, “A Small, Good Thing.”  I think of that ultimate loss in the story, the death of a child, of how beautifully

and simply and perfectly it is handled.  The same bandage for the biggest hurt of all.  I think of how Carver moves you from beginning to end with such economy but without sacrificing a single necessary observation, a single moment of heartbreaking insight.  And the ending.  That. Is. IT.  On those final pages, when mother and father and the baker of the child’s abandoned birthday cake sit together at the table.  When Carver knows what to do: ” ‘You probably need to eat something,’ the baker said.  ’I hope you’ll eat some of my hot rolls.  You have to eat and keep going.  Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,’ he said.  He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny.  He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat down at the table with them…”  And Carver doesn’t stop; what then follows are two absolutely-spot-on paragraphs; an ending that could be no other way.  But I’ll let you read it on your own.  It would be wrong not to.  

Still thinking of the story, I pay my check and look at the time, and realize that it’s still too early to head over to my friend’s apartment.  I decide to head next door to Marlow & Sons to grab a cup of PG Tips - a drink so foreign to my upbringing but so much a part of my grown-up New York life.  Back then, in the Midwest, it was cup and cup again of coffee.  A cup to start the day since the age of seven.  But now is different.  And I wonder if that difference is a new kind of comfort.  If having that thing that separates me from that breakfast table way-back-when is what gives me warmth.  If lunch alone and a tea to follow, so strange in comparison to what I knew and what I was… if this is what keeps me safe.   If, on a Wednesday in the here and now, this is what saves me.

April 13, 2009 - Two-thirds through After Henry and a slug back to get to the bottom of my tea cup, the book gets closed and sequins come out.  Tonight it’s Neko Case at the Nokia Theater and why oh why do I have the urge (again) to get sparkly?  Because the fact of the matter, the one that would best-be-kept-quiet, is what Didion, (always floating out on the air what we’d rather not have swirling about us,) writes in the title essay: “Writers are only rarely likeable.  They bring nothing to the party, leave their game at the typewriter.  They fear their contribution to the general welfare to be evanescent, even doubtful…”  

So is it true that if we glitter then that is, essentially, enough?  As if each of us has to stimulate, has to figure out in which way we will shine, and hope to God there will be others who choose the other ways… others who will complement us.  Or maybe it’s simply a primal instinct for some type of insurance policy: to enchant to be remembered.

I’m on to a glass of white, a 2003 Bovard Chasselas,  and suddenly I’m back to the way-back-when; before the rock shows entered with fake id’s, back to the Gordon’s bought by someone’s older brother.  Back when the promise of the night, the life-changing possibilities of every pre-adult moment were at once ridiculously exhilarating and monumentally terrifying.  Then I realize that little, really, has changed.  For this, my dears you do have to love New York City.  

Fluttering with the memories still, and suddenly I’m back with Didion.  “…(it had not yet struck me in any visceral way that being nineteen was not a long-term proposition, just as it had not yet struck Claudia and Julie and Anna and my daughter that they would recover from being thirteen), not only older and wiser but more experienced, more independent, more interesting, more possessed of an exotic past…”  This she writes in a later essay, Pacific Distances, about speaking to her daughter’ class and of the nostalgia-laced butterflying dread of later speaking to a class at her alma mater: 

So tonight I’m older, wiser, more experienced - yes.  But somehow nothing has changed - the moment at hand is still the most exciting, the most promise-filled.  Still for some inexplicable reason, every night-about-to-happen is still, miraculously, both fear-inducing and filled with wonderful anticipation.  And so, out the door I go, with the unshakeable weight of my adult worries.  Out I go, aware, yes, that I will “recover” from whatever it is I’m maligned with at any given urban-adult moment.  But as I walk out, into the city at night, I’m grateful for this: that someone or something will always shake me up, will always bewilder and haunt me. Something will electrify or horrify.  And at the end of the night, I’m truly grateful that there will always be something to recover from.