Comfort Food: The Critical Mom's Recommendation

Comfort Food

There's always vanilla ice cream, there's always chocolate, but for strength, I prefer a hearty, parmesan-and-garlic-crammed pesto (recipe on this blog, c. 2012). Arugula is available in large quantities here so I usually select that, but I love pesto with basil, too--even though basil only comes in plastic Edeka pots, as if it were masquerading as a house plant. 
For this dinner, I made pesto for the vegetarians and, for the vegan, stir-fried Shiitake mushrooms, snow peas, and tomatoes, in olive oil with a liberal smattering of crushed garlic. Whole wheat pasta and red wine make the whole thing prettier and taste great, too. An economic and soul-soothing meal.

The Critical Mom's Eulogy: Thinking about the Loss of a Good Man

I met Josef at the MLA convention—a gathering of academics seeking jobs and showing off—in Chicago, in 1990. I wasn’t expecting much. My good friend, like me a graduate student hoping to score at least one job offer, had met Josef at a layover on the way to the MLA. She told me he’d flirted with her.

            “I’m married,” Susan told him, “But you should meet my friend Melissa.”

            As we entered our overpriced hotel room, our feet freezing in the sub-zero Great Lakes climate, Susan confided, “I’ve met the perfect guy for you!”

            Oh, no, I thought, but did not say. Susan, very ambitious on my behalf, had already introduced me to several “perfect guys,” all of whom did not seem anywhere near as perfect to me as they did to her.

            On one occasion at a dinner party specifically arranged for me to meet yet another absolutely husband-material-great-character-smart, kind, just for you type, Susan’s husband took a photo of me and the guy.

            “They look like an advertisement for marital counseling,” he said. Side by side, the guy and I were looking in opposite directions, our legs crossed in opposite directions.

            So I was anything but enthusiastic when Susan announced yet another perfect catch, adding that she’d already arranged for us to meet the following morning.

            “What?” I said. I was hoping she’d just hand me his phone number, which I could discreetly lose.

            Instead, she’d planned a day with him and his friends (oh, good, his friends will be there, I thought, diluting any romance) at the Chicago Art Museum. Susan and I went off to meet them on the lower level of the Chicago Hyatt.

            She spotted Josef at the bottom of the escalators and gestured for him to stay there, but as we descended, he ascended. We passed each other on those escalators moving in opposite directions, and a thrill went through me. He was definitely the handsomest man I’d ever laid eyes on—the blue eyes, the light brown curls, the gentle grin, the beret rakishly tilted to one side, the leather jacket. The voice. I fell in love on the spot. Everyone I knew asked me how this relationship could possibly work. He was a devout Bavarian Catholic and I was a New Yorker without a Catholic background. But we believed in the same things. We just labeled our beliefs differently.

            Unfortunately, we continued to move in opposite directions for the next few years—he was in California and I was in New York. The course of true love never does run smooth, but I’m so glad we finally did get together.

We had a wonderful Bavarian wedding, in which Josef, dressed as Arnold Schwarzenegger, rescued me, his bride, abducted to another building, where I sat around singing American folk songs with his cousin Anton until Josef arrived with a water pump gun, spraying Anton. I remember drinking quite a lot of champagne, dancing until a friend advised me to watch out for a being whom she referred to as “little Siegfried,” who turned out to be my oldest son, who was five months along and did just fine. As did his brother and sister.

            I’m losing my husband, my best friend, my heart. I can’t imagine a better man. Here are some of my favorite lines from Shakespeare about the loss of a loved one:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

If Josef had to die, then his last fully lived day, November ninth, was appropriate as his exit. For Josef, November 9 was the day the Berlin wall fell—and he was a man devoted to breaking down barriers and boundaries, and fostering conversations between different kinds of people. He will be sorely missed. In the midst of mourning, I can celebrate having enjoyed twenty-one years with a guy who was madly in love with me and I with him.

This is the Way We Say Goodbye: Living Until the Last Minute

It's a luxury, being able to say goodbye at all. I tell myself that it's better to have loved and lost but the losing goes on, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. We hold hands and talk of mortgages, taxes, the damp spot in the guest bedroom wall that needs repair. 
The young doctor comes in, yanks at his stethoscope, asks, "What was your profession?" My husband and I look at each other. The past tense hangs around a man still living, still breathing, still practicing his profession--a dissertation lies on his hospital table. We read the fine print on the pharmacy description of the chemo we've been told has "no side effects," and find listed among numerous "unintentional results" the word "death." We laugh because we're crying.
"It's just death," we say, "just death!"
We talk of the suddenly vegan child, who last week demanded I buy him chicken ("I had to buy a Döner I was so hungry!") but who now does not wish to consume said chicken. We smile. We wish we could go on having our little talks and jokes about things the children are doing, what kind of wine we're having with dinner, and what we'll watch when we've gotten to the end of The Crown. We gloat over the kids again, toting up their successes, reminiscing about them, about the beginning of the romance, about love. We go back to small talk and holding hands, each of us afraid he's going to die tomorrow. 
And then he does, when I'm not there, but at least I'd read him the 23rd psalm in English and in German. I'm told his departure was fast and painless.