Books & Bakes February

photo by Sir Cecil Beaton, 1938

If you squint, don't I sort of, kind of, look like Gertrude? I even have a poodle! My Alice B. Toklas is Mirtha (just the cooking part), and I'm getting ready to have another group over to discuss Monique Truong's novel The Book of Salt. Because the book is about a Vietnamese chef who works for the legendary couple, our menu is both French and Vietnamese. We'll start with Pate and Gherkins and French cheese and crackers while sipping on a French rose. Dinner is a Vietnamese Noodle Salad with Shrimp, Beef or Vegetable Pho and Tofu Bahn Mi. For dessert I've shined up my rusty French pastry skills (another life) and made a Vacherin with Berries and some Ginger Black Peppercorn French Ice Cream. I won't divulge what happened to my first meringue.  Did it burn in our ancient oven that predates Gertrude herself? I'll never tell. I told you that I'm rusty, a far cry from this gal who cooked in a four-star New York City restaurant back in the day under one of those maniacal pastry chefs you read about and an equally maniacal French-Swiss-Hong Kong chef who yelled so much, his white face turned pink and his tall chef's hat nearly blew off with the steam from it. Never at me, though. Never.

The ice-cream base nearly boiled over, too, but I saved it in the nick of time, and it's now sitting in an ice bath, slices of ginger and tiny multi-colored peppercorns steeping away. Oh, la, la.

Wish you were here.

The sprinkler timer is awry

The sprinkler timer is awry, and right around sunset instead of rise,  the pipes lurch, the heads pop up and the water hisses through spray watering the seeds that Jesus (haysoos) the gardener not the carpenter sprinkled just Saturday. I feel the water sound right through the back screen door as I type. The dog stands alert, the dog thought of squirrels he might catch, the neighbor cat that slinks on by and through the hole in the fence. I hear the hiss of summer lawns, that beautiful phrase of Joni Mitchell's, I lie on my back and wish that I were naked, free of care. I am not. Free of care. The pipes lurch again, the hiss becomes a whisper and then the crickets raise their bows. I have put Sophie in bed too early, it's too early for an eighteen year old to go to bed, the crickets cry, their violin plaint rising. I have too much care. I will lie on my back on the bed and listen to the violins, recall my dream last night. We lay on our backs on a bed. We had no care. Your smile was wide above us, you put down your bow. A curtain blew in the window, I reached up and it ran through my fingers like water, like summer. You hissed and then whispered. Jesus (haysoos) and the woman at the well with the water. We had no care.

Whispering Pines

Do you know that song, a Richard Manuel/The Band plaintive cry? If you find me in a gloom, or catch me in a dream --

I hear that song in my head today as I scurry about, mailing packages, filling out forms, going to the grocery store, diapering and dressing Sophie, fixing her hair and putting her in the backyard swing where she'll sit just for a minute, while I write, I said, and I gave her, it, the swing, a shove, told the dog to stop barking and ran up the back steps into my room, inside my room, my lonely room, there is no in-between. What else comes to me but songs from other lives, that other life, that I penned in small spiral notebooks, in tinier script, even a poem in French that I picked out of a stack the other day, opened and read, remembered.

Pour la premiere fois
j'ai vu la Saturne
et je pense a toi
deux lunes autour d'une
lumiere brilliante.

I spent two weeks hiking in the wilderness of the Adirondacks one summer between my junior and senior years. I had Pascal in my head, read St. Augustine on a bus with a big girl named Cheryl, wrote character notes about moon-faced women and boys tripping on LSD, camp lantern lighting the page. Our instructor was bald and stooped, a leprauchan who knew the names of all the trees and plants, the rocky paths, the peaks. I came back thin, so thin, from twenty mile hikes, seventy, eighty miles in, a sixty-five pound backpack wrapped on my already small frame. I wore a blue cashmere sweater with cables, thin in spots, and when we climbed down and dispersed, I spent the night alone in a hotel room in Syracuse. I shaved my legs in a porcelain tub and sank, deep, into hot water. I ordered steak and a potato, had it delivered to my room and devoured it like a beast. The next day I flew back to school, was met at the airport, I think, by a boy, but I can't be sure. I can feel you standing there, but I don't see you anywhere -- I will wait until it all goes 'round -- With you in sight, the lost are found --