Summer is my favorite time of the year but it is also one of my saddest times. The most vivid of my memories over the course of my life have always been of summer.
When I was four, I played outside after dinner in my white seersucker shorty-pajamas that were dotted in crayon colors. I rocked on a paint-chipped wooden horse rocker that lurched on the uneven flagstone patio next to tin garbage pails that reeked of old milk.
When Marika was four I took her to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival where mountains of watermelons were stacked under willow trees. Wearing her pink angel wings, she was sticky and dripping pink down her chin and chest as she tore into her slice of watermelon, not quite having mastered the art of spitting out the seeds.
I took Marika and her brother to the ocean with boogey boards. They were laughing and fearless in the waves as I stood stiffly alongside them, nervously jumping up with each swell.
When I was fifty and Marika was eleven, I had climbed the lifeguard’s tower, high up over the waterfront at Camp Scatico, to blow the whistle that commanded the whole of Girls’ Side to stop for a buddy count and when, baked from the sun, I climbed back down to the white paint-cracked docks, Marika gave me a big wet hug.
Summer has always been a time of campfires and roasting things over them on sticks, blueberry and then raspberry picking, watching fireflies, getting wet without worry, wearing shorts and sandals, and feeling light and free. But you know the summer will end and there are question marks or blanks about what comes next and, around the middle of August, you need to face the inevitable nagging thing that was so easy to blow off while the stretch of so many long and hot summer days lured you away. Summer always ends like a slowly burning candle that melts shorter and shorter still, with a dark wick which finally curls up in a puddle of wax and extinguishes itself in a long rising wisp of grey smoke.
Memories of Summer
Marika Warden, October 18, 2009
I close my eyes to see your face
Your image prompts my heart to race
As I relapse, I retrace
My memories of summer.
A night so clear we couldn’t miss
A single star. Complete bliss!
And then we shared our first real kiss
At the eve of summer.
Another night, dark and warm
We didn’t put our swimsuits on.
I just floated in your arms
Shivering in summer.
Lying on a hill out West,
I found myself quite underdressed.
You held me close beneath your vest
Stargazing in summer.
That last night I knew was due
I just could not face the truth.
I really did want to tell you
That I was sick that summer.
My mind’s snapshot of this summer is of floating in a friend’s pond at the Sunday Morning Hikers’ annual party. Overhead is the big inverted bowl of blue sky laced with the tops of tall dark trees. All around, friends float, dogs paddle, and the coolest but warmest welcoming water surrounds and hugs and holds every grateful inch of me.
Have you ever said yes when you really meant to say no, and then found yourself in the middle of some of the most fun you could imagine?
During June and July, I’d done little other than sit and write for hours, for days. It was hard work always rewriting, dredging up more memories, writing and rewriting again. Then, one evening at my friend Celia’s dinner table, which was topped with what Abby Nashoften refers to as “the best food and wine to be found in Ithaca tonight,” Abby, our god of wine and dining, asked me if I’d like to be a teaching assistant for his upcoming week long cooking class at Cornell’s Adult University. Avoiding commitment, I said I’d check my calendar. I did not get excited or jump at the opportunity. In fact, I tried to forget about it. But I couldn’t ignore the little voice inside me that whispered, “Are you planning to just sit on your butt for the whole summer?” and “This is the first job you’ve been offered in years, Miss Unemployed” and “Where’s your spirit of adventure?”
So the next week, there I was, alongside Maria, a veteran teaching assistant, with my hair banded and tied up, wearing my Converse sneakers and a long, fresh white lab coat, ready to rock ‘n’ roll in Cornell’s food labs. Twelve eager foodies, mostly Cornell Alums, showed up ready to spend one of the hottest weeks of the summer cooking away the days. They divided into six teams in six adjacent kitchens. Every morning they assembled at 9AM with a goal to have a royal lunch ready, with a white wine and a red, by 1:30 each day. After lunch, they’d prepare and cook some more until 3:30PM, when they’d file out and Abby, Maria and I would begin our scrub-down frenzy. It became apparent from day one that my job, after helping Maria with the morning preparations, was mostly to be fetching, washing and returning all the pots and pans and dishes and utensils. And cutting boards. And the thirty-six wine glasses we used daily. And various pieces to ice cream makers, food processors and blenders. Each day, the complexity and the number of dishes they cooked increased. And each dish was made twice, by two different kitchens. Towards the end of the week I had grooved in a routine, which sped up automatically with the increased workload, and I no longer collapsed in exhaustion or nursed sore feet at the day’s end.
Then, on Thursday, the teams made doubles of Chilled Curried Zucchini Soup, Caesar Salad, Salad with Duck Confit, Duck Confit with Pommes Sarladaise and Cranberry Golden Relish, Shrimp with White Beans, Roasted Tomatoes and Pistou, Leek Gruyere Quiche, Pear Frangipane Tarte, Crepes Suzettes and Fresh Mango Sorbet. Plus the chocolate ganache and pound cake needed for the next day’s Italian desserts, Il Diplomatico and Cassata Siciliana.
Imagine, if you love to cook, how your cooking behaviors would change if you had someone constantly squirreling away the dirty dishes as fast as you could use them. So the sinks fill up and I frantically run back and forth squeezing around the cooks who stir and ponder their custards, as I collect, clean and redistribute the dishes to the six kitchens. Maria measures and distributes food items and I deal mostly with The Dishwasher, dubbed “better than a husband” by one of the class cooks. I feed it large loaded trays and it huffs and clunks, churns and hisses for five minutes, at which point I bend over, already dripping in sweat, into a hot steamy cloud, remove the tray of cleaned dishes and feed it another loaded tray of soiled ones. I sneak tastes of leftover sauces and sorbets before flinging the residue down the drain. I scrape cast iron pans, I squeegee the long stainless steel sink, I heave heavy high-density plastic cutting boards and dripping containers of all sorts. The sinks are stuffed and I tumble through the kitchens carrying as much as I dare, mindful of the disastrous potential of drips. I am singing “It’s a Hard-Knock Life” from the scene in the musical Annie, where the orphans are mopping floors, when the spray nozzle I am squirting, full force into a clotted pot, shoots and splatters clumps of chocolate all over my face and tied-up hair. The white lab coat, now stained with chocolate dregs, hangs heavy and warm on me like someone else’s used wet bath towel. Damp and disheveled, I sit down for lunch with the class, with my two glasses of wine and two plates of mostly magnificent food and suddenly I am content and fortified for the afternoon’s assignment.
And Friday, after the last class, cranky and dragging and dead-tired, Abby, Maria and I clean up and do a complete inventory of sixteen lab kitchens. We clear and carry off the leftovers, the recyclables, the compost and the garbage, until 7PM. I was exhausted but well fed, sad it was over but proud of myself. I was reminded of a day long ago when I had my Silk Oak design and hand silkscreen printing business, when my father came by to see what my business was about. It was at a craft show on a beach near his home on Long Island. I had set up and stocked my booth beautifully with my wares. He arrived to see people crowded three deep around my table, tearing at the folded piles of tee shirts and throwing twenty dollar bills at me as I bagged shirts and returned change. A storm was brewing and my shirts, strung up on poles and racks around the booth, were flapping wildly with the wind when a strong gust nearly threw over the whole booth. My father grabbed the poles and shirts nearest him just before they could set sail, just as the rain started pouring down in buckets, scattering customers and creating chaos. He held onto the poles, which still held dripping runny tee shirts, as I ran to get my car. We were both completely soaked as we crammed the poles and racks and saturated shirts into the car, and he turned to me and shouted above the din of the storm, “This is One Hell of a way to make a living!”
I wonder what he’d say if he saw me madly dashing about in my Converse sneakers, washing away all those dishes and contending with chaos this week. I wonder what he’d think about my own work these days, sitting and writing and rewriting my book, day after day, after day, after day without the promise of a paycheck.
If Abby asks me to be his teaching assistant, I will happily do it again next year. What different thing will you try?
T.S. Eliot, in his poem, “The Naming of Cats,” declares that every cat has three names: an everyday name that everyone uses, a particular name that reflects its individual nature and best traits, and a secret name that illuminates its soul. Doesn’t that sound like a neat idea? I always liked that.
So I have three names. In addition to my everyday name that is now google-able and blossoming over the internet, the one my mother gave me that she found somewhere in the New York City 1950s media, I have my particular second name. It is not very elegant. It is not necessarily peculiar as T.S. Eliot dictates a second name should be. But I like it. Ages ago, at the beginning of a weeklong Girl Scout camp one summer, Marika and I were asked to give our nicknames. If we didn’t already have a nickname we would be assigned one. So I quickly chose the name Rabbit, our favorite animal, when Marika did not adopt that name for her own. Twelve years later, the unreserved leader of my Sunday Morning Hiking Group asked me for my nickname. So now, under the weekly-posted Who Hiked Today mugshot, it says “Rabbit.” Short and simple, it makes me feel light and limber.
My third name, as in T.S. Eliot’s cats’ third names, is too sacred to be uttered. Long ago, I gave myself an “inscrutable” and “ineffable” third name. To me, it is the most beautiful and powerful name in the world next to the name I gave my daughter. It is the name I remind myself of when the sky chips and crumbles around me, when my world seems stuck under a boulder. This name got me through the bleak weeks after my daughter died. At the calling hours, facing my sad and shocked community, I contemplated my third name to keep myself open and brave. To kick myself out of the house the months after, I invoked the song of my sweet secret name. When people are less than warm and welcoming, I remind myself of this name, of who I really am, and then I can let whatever coldness, indifference and rejection I am served slide off somewhere beyond me.
Someday I will share my third name. It may need to be changed one day; I could fall into or grow into another name. Then, I will give it away like I give away my used clothes. Maybe I will name a new pet or a new book with this magical name that keeps me compassionate but mortars my resilience. Or maybe I will take my third name to my grave. I cannot share it with you now. But I can tell you my fourth name. It is Marika’s Mom. And it’s a keeper.
Do you keep a third name or a fourth name for yourself?
Have you ever noticed how close laughter is to crying? Days ago, I laid on the floor doing sit-ups and crunches. My dog, Suki, stood over me, engrossed by this new perspective, and poked her little inquisitive nose right in my face. It started out as strained stifled giggles that sounded almost like sobbing. It grew into a bona fide body-shaking laugh when Suki dropped her squeak toy on my chest. Then I heard my high-pitched squealing laugh suddenly dissolve into a full-fledged howling cry. I wailed and shuddered and sunk into sorrow. Sorrow is what I lived with for so long. It is like an old familiar husband who haunts every corner of my home. I divorce sorrow. It can claim only the smallest part of my life now.
Another time, I received a package from Marika’s friend, Carla. It felt like it weighed nothing so I was already amused before even opening the big box. Inside, I found a thousand folded paper cranes, skewered and strung up in denim-colored yarn, each one crafted from a small calendar page of Dalai Lama insights. I laughed and cried simultaneously with uncontainable tears and whoops of laughter.
There is plenty of room for more laughter in my life. I need to invite it in more. It needs to take over the fear and negativity that too often creep in.
Like days ago, when I walked Suki in the driveway and adrenaline spiked every inch of me when I spotted a big dark threatening lump that seemed to be moving towards us. It was a turtle the size of a dinner plate. It had a big tail and a vicious-looking beak of a mouth. Suki strained at the leash to investigate further but I felt sheer terror and ran to the other side of the house dragging her along behind me. It was a turtle! A poor confused, displaced turtle. A silly ridiculously slow and unconcerned animal. And it was in my driveway where at any time my son’s friends’ jeeps and trucks dash in and out whipping up small storms of pebbles and dirt. I could have laughed but instead I ran in fear.
And last night my dear friend, Liz, called to invite me and Suki to “come over right now for a campfire.” I love campfires. I love spur of the moment invitations. It was an opportunity to sit back with friends and watch fireflies and laugh in the light of a flaming crackling campfire.
“I just got back from dinner, I just sat down to write, my laundry isn’t done, the litter needs scooping, it’s 8:30 already and I’m tired.”
Two hours later, violins played in the background as I hammered myself over the head, beat my butt and kicked myself for not being spontaneous and losing out on a great opportunity. I went to bed disappointed and disgusted with myself.
But this morning I forgive myself. It’s okay to have a setback or two once in a while. I’ll take a rain check and be kinder to myself and initiate a new opportunity for fun. Because I need to laugh more. Even if it sometimes dissolves into tears.
When Marika was eleven, our old cat, Sushi, died. We buried her in the garden where, choking and teary-eyed, I read a long eulogy of the cat’s history and attributes. We sang a song. When I thought we were done with the funeral, Marika surprised me. She announced she wanted to read aloud a poem she’d written and typed up for Sushi. Fascinated, I melted when I heard her very different view and relationship with the cat I adored.
Almost ten years later, when Marika died, I stole into her room stalking through her things. I searched for a message, for some sign of her, for her dwindling scent left buried in her bed linens. Desperate to learn more about her, I pored over her writings and photographs and discovered an amazing young woman who had grown from my spirited little girl. During her three year battle with leukemia, we sat stuck together in the same space sharing little beyond the immediate circumstances. I missed countless opportunities to talk with her. We both loved good food, chocolate, summer and bright lights. Marika loved to sing. She loved soccer, sushi, small dogs, the color turquoise, playing with children and playing poker. She loved her friends. She had a lot of friends. A thousand people or more knew her in a thousand different ways. If I sat with each of them and listened, would I learn a thousand new things about her?
Who was Marika to you? What were some of the memorable times? What crazy or kind or nasty things did she do? What could you count on her for? What will you remember her for?
The more I talk to others about her, the more I realize her short life was so much larger than being my daughter. When I heard how she hopped a fence to sneak into a sold-out concert on Long Island, I laughed. And when I heard she tried to convince a good friend to be her healthcare proxy before giving the honor to me, I smiled. Marika’s life had grown and burst brilliantly beyond hospitals, home and her mother. And that makes me want to hug and thank every soul that knew her.
As I reach out to my family and friends, to Marika’s friends, and to people I have not yet met, I know we are linked in many ways. We hope and we dream. We have things we hold close and, at some time, we all lose someone or something dear. So how did you come to know grief?
Somewhere, someone said, “Treat others as you would have them treat you,” so on weekday mornings, in order to get Marika up on time to catch the early school bus, I made her breakfast in bed. Whatever I made for myself, I set out a portion for her on an enticing tray garnished with fruit. It was always delivered with a beautifully folded napkin, tea and love. It was easy and it worked. She ate, got out of bed, got herself together and got the bus. Food was my currency of love.
Last weekend I was in the Berkshires with my mother and my sister. When we get together we mostly shop, watch movies and eat every meal out in really good restaurants. During these visits to my mother’s house, we find our way to the kitchen and the fridge only to stow away doggie bags or get a drink to down our pills. But I remember when my mother cooked chocolate pudding regularly for us. Did you ever have chocolate pudding made fresh from scratch? My sister and I took turns licking the hot pot and the old wooden mixing spoon. Good food, especially chocolate pudding, could always tame us. Chocolate pudding was one of the first things I learned to cook when I left home. It evolved into pots de crème and became a staple in my repertoire when Abigail Dodge, The Weekend Baker, came up with a 10-minute no-bake version.
When I got home from the weekend, I brought a picnic dinner of sushi and cherries to my best friend, Celia. We ate by her pond and I complained that I was depressed. She pointed out to me that I am always depressed when I return from visiting my mother. We walked around her long country block with our dogs and then I went home to bed.
First thing in the morning, after a dizzying foray of Wegmans, I started to cook. Cooking is no longer a solid part of my routine, especially now that the house is mostly empty. A decade ago, if company was coming for Thanksgiving dinner I diligently started the day cooking early in the morning. When Marika was around I often cooked eggplant parmesan and steaks. But more recently, I am a sporadic cook. If Celia mentions the Strawberry Rhubarb Tapioca Pudding she posted on her blog, www.fingerlakesfeasting.com, I will not be able to focus on anything else until I am stirring my own batch and it is dripping down my chin. If the word “curry” comes up in conversation, I become haunted by memories of past stews scenting the whole house with coriander and cumin, fried mustard seed and fenugreek, and then there is little I can do to stop myself from dashing off to the spice isle in Greenstar, Ithaca’s Natural Foods Market.
So, in a frenetic cooking flurry this morning, before doing any of the pressing things on the day’s list, I made myself chocolate pots de crème, a spinach-asparagus soup (I couldn’t find sorrel for Celia’s Finger Lakes Feasting Sorrel Soup) and a yummy yam-apple-ginger soup I concocted to warm a sad heart whether served hot or chilled. I treated myself like I treat others I love. My mother said, “You can’t sing and eat soup at the same time.” But I smiled and sang over my soup and pudding today. And there are enough leftovers to keep me sated for the rest of the week.
What will you do to treat yourself well this week?
Yamappleginger Soup
Crudely dice 1 medium sweet onion, 2 large yams and 1 unpeeled apple. Finely dice 1 generous peeled inch of ginger.
Saute the onion in 2 tsp olive oil for 3 minutes. Add the yam, apple and ginger.
Stir.
Add 32 ounces of veggie or chicken or beef broth, plus 1 cup water.
Cover and cook 25 minutes.
Blend with a speed hand blender or in a food processor.
Salt and pepper the soup if desired.
Enjoy hot, warm or cold.
