Meadowbrook

When the nurses in the delivery ward of a hospital receive word that a patient is incoming with a stillborn, an entirely different set of procedures are put in place. The first thing you notice, if you've been previously admitted for a regular birth, is the lack of urgency. AT ALL. There are no monitors, no one scurries in to make you comfortable or begins an endless series of tests. There is simply silence. The door opens periodically. A nurse who just began her shift who hasn't been told, or a chaplain who offers solace and Last Rites for the child who never had any to begin with.

When you ask the doctor about the C-section that must be forthcoming (because who would expect a woman to deliver a dead baby, surely you must just cut it out and end the nightmare quickly) you are informed that that is a very dangerous thing to do and the best way is to just let the fetus expel itself. "Let the fetus expel itself" is not mentioned in the baby books or at BabiesRUs when you are shopping for onesies.

So you get a shot of pitocin and wait alone until the cramps come. Cramps so wrenching, you may as well be having the baby. Or dying. A gunshot doesn't feel worse than this pain.You get the shot and endure. Endure is a good word for this. Flip through the channels waiting for your husband to come back after he drops the three year-old off at Nana's. The three year-old is excited to have a baby brother or sister. You aren't sure which. You'd asked to not be told so everyone could be surprised. Life has so few real surprises anymore, you had thought. What an idiot.

He arrives right when the insides of your body have begun churning and clenching. The doctor comes in and asks if you want the epidural. Can it be administered to my heart and brain? No? Fine. Get it over with. Just get it all over with.
Instead of the birth certificate people showing up, the people from the funeral home come and volunteer to inter your child however you would like. For free, even, as long as you select the basic design, just like a checking account. You are not a plain with address-type so you pick one that looks like a beautiful Indian hand-grenade. A cremated baby takes very little space and you don't live near a family cemetery. It seems appropriate.

When it is time and the contractions aren't stopping, the doctor and nurse come in with a tray and a pink bucket. The kind they might toss a tumor into during surgery. Your baby. The one you carried and talked to and loved and had hopes and dreams for is going in a pink plastic tub like it is a piece of useless trash.

That is when you want to die and you close your eyes and talk to your 3 year-old in your brain and tell him Mommy is going to be home really soon and you're sorry he's not a big brother and you talk to God and tell him he's a fucking asshole and you hate him forever because of this and when the baby finally comes you can't even look, let alone hold it.
If either of those things happen, you will go a kind of crazy that there is no coming back from.

They take your girl away. Yes. It was a daughter. Your husband, for all his faults and inadequacies, had the balls to see her and kiss her and be with her and you don't. You failed. YOU FAILED.

You will not be able to look at or touch a baby for the next four years without having to excuse yourself to go shriek silently in an alone place or hyperventilate.

You know that there are women walking around everywhere who this has happened to and no one ever talks about it. You are not one of those women.


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The phone rang at 4:45 am, jerking the sheriff out of his dream and into the tiny den off of the kitchen that he'd been sleeping in ever since Pam died. He couldn't bring himself to sell the house. It was full of the memories of everything good that had happened in the last 20 years. He also couldn't stand the idea of laying in the bed they had shared,or getting rid of it, so every night he climbed into the tiny twin that he had bought for the nurses and home workers, and twisted the ring on his left hand around and around until he fell asleep.

His first thought at the sound of the ring was to let it go. If it was an emergency, Dwayne or Myrna would start calling on the radio and if it was anyone else, well, it was his day off.

RRRRINGG

Whoever it was had better be bleeding.




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Meadowbrook was a bit of a misnomer.
There was no meadow to speak of, just a few chicken and dairy farms covering about two square miles in the corner of Hopkins County. As far as anyone could remember, there had never been anything so much as resembling a brook, although Glover Rayburn swore there was a trout pond there once that got hit by lightening in '66. "Biggest fish-fry you ever set your eyes on", he'd tell anyone who asked.

The police department had two employees, including the sheriff. The dispatcher was the deputy's wife who came in at night to bring him dinner and keep him company while they watched Golden Girls reruns on TV Land. During the day, the calls were routed through Wood County since they usually had a grand total of four cars driving around at any given time.

When Wichita Foster opened the manila folder Garland had left on his desk and took a look at the girl they had brought in the night before, he was surprised to see a pair of clear blue eyes and the pretty face of a girl who looked to be the same age as his daughter.

The surprise wasn't that she was attractive. It was her expression. There was not a hint of sadness in her face. Not a mean pull at the corners of her mouth, no squint or glare. None of the usual hardness or anger he was used to finding on the faces of these young women who turn so violent.

He wasn't sure where he stood on genetics vs. environment but he was sure this girl had come from a good
family.

He'd have been half right. Esper Parker was a drunk, but he was a friendly one who worked hard to feed those kids and keep a roof over their heads after their daddy drowned.
                                                 
 

 

 

                                                            

Mt. Pleasant

When a rat-fucking son-of-a-bitch like Ed Horne turns up dead there's two things for certain.

Ain't nobody going to be real surprised.
Ain't nobody gonna be real sorry, neither.



                                                                        -------------------


 From the Sulpher Springs Telegraph Sunday July 20, 1924:

MAN DROWNS AS WIFE LOOKS ON UNABLE TO HELP

James E. Horne, city employee, latest drowning victim.

Stepping from shallow, into water ten feet deep as he seined for minnows in the levee "bar pits"along the Trinity River a mile and a half past Grauwyler Bridge, James Edward Horne, aged 38, a foreman in the city street and bridge department, drowned late Saturday as his wife and daughter looked on, helpless to aid. John Price, negro and city employee, who lives on the Horne place, tried unavailingly to save the drowning man's life.

Horne is the eleventh person to drown in this county this year. Price asserted that Mr. Horne was able to only swim a few strokes and that his heavy shoes and clothes hampered him in his effort to regain the shore and dragged him down to his death.

"We had been in the pit just a few moments, using the little seine when Mr. Ed went under all of a sudden, " Price declared. "He came up twice and got hold of the seine, crying for me to help him. I tried to pull him in, but his hands slipped off, he went under, and I couldn't find him anymore"

Couldn't Locate Him

The negro and Waylan Macon, 5317 Ash Lane, who was attracted to the scene by Mrs. Horne's frantic screams for help, dived for close to an hour in an effort to bring him to the surface. "I saw him near the top once, but he sank from sight when I went in after him and I couldn't find him again" Macon said, " I'm pretty sure he was already dead."

Horne and his wife and their little daughter Doris had gone to the bridge on a fishing trip Saturday afternoon. After reaching the bridge, he decided to seine for minnows before beginning to fish.

Saw Him Lose Grasp

Mrs. Horne, who stood screaming on the bank, waited until she saw her husband go under a second time before running for help. She raced through more than a mile of dense underbrush before reaching Old Maple Road where she was able to use the telephone of W.W. Stor to call for help.

Deputy sheriffs found her in the pits just a hundred yards of where her husband's body was finally located, crying broken-heartedly. She drove her automobile back to their home where she fainted and was put under the care of physicians.

Both the emergency ambulance and automobiles from the sheriffs office carrying Deputy Sheriffs Bob Jones, Earl Sypert and John Heffington answered the call. The use of grappling hooks by members of the sheriffs office failed to locate the dead man, and diving was resorted to.  "I found him face down in about nine feet of water," Adolphus Lee Whatley said.  "He, apparently, had been dead about an hour."  After the body was taken from the water it was placed in the emergency ambulance.  Later on it was transferred to the ambulance of the Smith Undertaking company, which also had responded to the call.  Mr. Horne is survived by his wife and two daughters, Nettie Lou, 14 years old and Doris Lee, 12 years old.


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After Ed's funeral, there were a few callers to the farm, offering to turn the field and cut and cord the wood for winter. Alta was amused. She appreciated the extra sets of hands but she had no interest in the rest of their parts.

It had taken her 16 years to be rid of that man and his mess and she had no intention of being subject to someone's ill temper or dirty coveralls again. Still, Esper kept coming around.

His wife Millie had gotten sick just before Christmas and was dead from lung cancer by Easter. When he came to see if he could change the chain on the plough, she had felt sorry for him and invited him in for coffee and some biscuits.

Five years of baked good and home repairs later, they admitted that there was more than just neighborly reciprocation happening and he asked her to marry him one Sunday morning after church. Ed hadn't even asked. Just took her down to the courthouse, put the paper in front of her and told her he'd buy her a used Ford and a new washer if she'd sign it.

When she thought back to that day, she realized she should have flipped the two. She'd have had an excuse to not do the laundry and a car that could have driven her as far away from that damned farmhouse as she could go.

Maybe to California to see Marie, who was writing home to tell about the high life she was living with that mobster she kept calling a businessman.Why would a grown man with a perfectly good name like Benjamin want to be called Bugsy?


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 They keep telling me they're going to find out how I did it.
"You left something, somewhere.It's just a matter of time" Sheriff Foster said when he unlocked the holding cell and let me leave with AJ

I don't think I meant to kill him but maybe I did
Maybe I was tired of being called a dumb cunt every time I forgot something at the grocery or didn't finish folding the laundry.
I hated cleaning up after him.
The way he left his clothes right next to the hamper.
The toenails I found flung all over the house.
He told me once that I should take pride in getting the skidmarks off his Fruit of the Loom's because 'That's what a good wife does, Marsh'.

I guess I'm not that good.


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"The RV is a success, Myrna, because it allows women to pee every 20 minutes without ever having to find a rest stop"

Dwayne and Myrna were having Cokes and talking about whether to sink their retirement into a time share down in Port Aransas where Dwayne could net shrimp while Myrna learned to watercolor sea fowl. And they could take nice long walks on the beach and grill the delicious shrimp that Dwayne had caught just hours earlier.

This was what Myrna's picture of happily ever after looked like.  The other 50 weeks of the year could be spent visiting her sister over in Tyler and growing those roses that Dwayne swore were costing him at least half the retirement they were discussing.

Dwayne had a different movie playing in his theater. One that had quite a bit of golf in places that ended in 'a' and catching fish in rivers that didn't have rattlesnakes swimming in them. He had just pulled up a picture of the new Coachmen Concord and was about to start showing her the kitchen and bathroom features as  methods of persuasion when there was a buzzing at the intercom.

It was early. Too early, even for Jimmy Foster, who sometimes dropped off the paper and came inside for a few minutes to hear who was breaking the law and how in Hopkins County.
There was no one there when he opened the back door, but an envelope fell and he bent down to pick it up.

It wasn't sealed or addressed. He pulled out contents and when he unfolded the note inside there was a picture of a farmhouse. The back of the picture was marked 'Winnsboro' and on the paper were just two words

'Horne Witches'.

Witches

Well, now.
That could mean a couple things.
Could be someone was a bit too Christian to use the B-word. Could mean they were hag-like in temperament and stature.

Or

It could mean "one that is credited with usually malignant supernatural powers; especially: a woman practicing usually black witchcraft often with the aid of a devil or familiar"*

Dwayne was familiar with the first two kinds seeing as Myrna's mother was a pageant winner in both, but the third? That was crap. No such thing. There were some people in town who claimed that the woods out at the edge of the county were spooked and that there were meetings out there where people wore hoods and robes that weren't white like normal, but black and red. Meetings that were more like rituals. Sacrifices, baby goats, baby pigs, baby babies, who knew what. 

The people who spread these stories tended to be folk like the Twisselmans and George Rose's jar of nuts. Crazy meth-heads who lived out past Horseshoe Road, in trailers with 10 cars in the front on blocks and lawn mower parts everywhere.

If they said there were babies being killed out in the woods it was probably because they were getting mixed up with one of those awful movies Myrna liked to watch on Netflix. He couldn't stand them, all those bright red and pink bits of fake flesh and intestine smashed all over the screen while girls ran around in panties acting surprised. 

All them people watched that kind of filth. Every time he had to answer a call out there one of them would have a TV on with something godawful on the screen, or they'd have a bunch of posters haphazardly taped  up. Naked women with chainsaws coming out of their lady parts, or clowns, razor-teeth bared, blood smeared all over their grinning, demonic faces. Dwayne couldn't imagine what kind of dreams the kids who lived in these houses must have.

That's who believed in witches, He thought. Looney-tunes on drugs. Not regular people and certainly not the deputy sheriff of the Meadowood Police Department..


*thank you Webster's online



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National Lampoon's Culinary Vacation

Dear Clark,
Come on, now.
This is getting a little bit embarrassing, if you don't mind my sayin' so. 
It's FOOD.
You're having so many of them Marie Antoinette moments lately, I feel like I need to step up and piss in your  farmed and forked and fucked Cheerios and say something respectfully and with great love and encouragement and affection.

WHAT IN THE JESUS IS WRONG WITH YOU?????

Seriously, Clark. Only an idiot would pay $1000 for something that is going to come out of their ass a few hours later and then have any kind of comment about hunger in America. Ever.  EVER, EVER. If you would like to demonstrate your superiority to me, it would be more intelligent to not purchase tiny amounts of dead, cut-up animals and bits of lettuce that grew in the ground for free. This makes you a SUCKER. I'm a chef and I am telling you that. You are a chump. 

What kind of person can, in good conscience, keep most of the money they make feeding said asshats, instead of giving most of it back to the other people who are food insecure according to every news source in the country and that includes a lot more than I get with my cable converter? Even at a 50% food cost, you're still making a fortune off of tricking people into thinking it's worth that much for future feces. Nice work, Willy Wonka.

Do you have any idea how silly it is for you to be so "involved" in food when your involvement doesn't include making sure as many other people are fed as possible, instead of a few app designers who wouldn't know what they were eating were it not for the other rich assholes before them posting thousands of Instagrams?  I know you like a tack-o, Clark, but the rise of street food as haute cuisine, meriting full tasting menus comprised of offal, is, well, awful.  It's The Emperor's Clothes at it's most entertaining.

I once worked for the catering company that does Paul Allen's Christmas party. I spent a FREEZING December afternoon in 1998, grilling what ended up being four rolling racks full of whole salmon filets on a dock. Earmuff hats are very handy for blue collar folk who have to work outside in the snow. Long johns too. You call them Silkies, I think. Cooking is FUN, btw.

We cured olives and preserved lemons months ahead of time.  Made pounds of mozzarella, smoked oysters, made biryani in rented tagines, dipped fruits in Callebaut. We cut a walk-in full of Port Salut and Humboldt Fog into wedges and spread pounds of Salumi's soppressata onto huge wooden cutting boards purchased just for the occasion The excess was as bonkers as you.

When you are a lowly cook processing all this food, things that run through your head while you hack apart chickens include the society broads who will never eat more than four bites of any of this dee-licious spread that you are going to the trouble to prepare. You also consider, in a nice way, the catering salesperson who made $5k in commission for selling all this.
Mr. Allen's hangar at Boeing Field was turned into a Moroccan tent with jeweled pillows and belly dancers. The halftime show was the man himself trying to force everyone to watch him play guitar. Good lord. 

Know what has stuck with me 15 years later? The two racks full of untouched salmon. Left AFTER the to-go containers were stuffed and servers were begged to take as much as they wanted.

The St. Rose of Lima shelter was near my apartment and I could take them a carload at a time. I'd pull up to the backdoor in a dark alley in Belltown and hand over bus tubs of salmon thrown together with the other stuff. A far cry from the display a few hours earlier. Dumpsters-full of expensive cheese and wine and steak and oysters and chocolate and things that we talk about as yum to the motherfucking yum yum yum get tossed hundreds of times every single day by people who then go on to make sad, pinchy faces about the hungry black childrens they are forced to look at sometimes in the NYT.  Or speak about SNAP benefits as if they have any idea. I don't care if your mom used food stamps to raise you. You have a bunch of restaurants and a TV show now so shut it the hell down, Baldy. For reals.

Humans are complex. I get it. Sometimes you can want to eat truffles and then go to the ghetto and teach a child what a carrot is. That is funny as fuck. Why not bring THEM to the fancy dinner that they will never, ever forget? Why not expose them to something as magical as a truffle when their mom is just going to feed them bologna later. Why exclude anyone?

It's food. No one is curing pediatric brain cancer or rescuing flood victims. You are eating things that mostly are on this planet because the planet decided this, and not because Anthony Bourdain invented olives. Capice?

There is alchemy in cooking. Duh. We are literal magicians making something out of nothing and that is something to feel pretty great about. We all fall for pictures of tattoos of eggplants, posts of perfect figs and cheese on a black granite slab.  We love reading stories of how hard that farmer had to work to get those silly goats to behave, but still.

It's food. To feed people with so they don't die from starving. Not so they don't die from sadness that some poor person brought a baby to a restaurant. To forget that is to forget the joy of pulling a carrot out of the ground or to cook a chicken until it turns to jelly that makes the gravy, gravy. To act like you are a special, special twinkie instead of an alien sharing some molecules with some other aliens means that you need a lesson in humanity that will not be printed on the bottom of your triple Caramel Flan nonfat (retard) latte or while your are funding your friend's kombucha kickstarter.

I don't know what we can do when we are a culture of people who wish they had more money worshipping a farmer who likely has nothing. Pig shit smells like pig shit. Not like miso-cured pork belly.

How can we say we want to feed people when most of the shows on the food channels have to do with excess, not inequality? How can social media be so much more concerned with the correct filter for composites of dots of food that no one can smell or taste? How much longer do I have to see people promoting cookbooks instead of volunteering somewhere and writing about those experiences which seems more useful than a few more recipes for a watermelon soup that no one likes or wants to eat?

I don't expect any BlogHerFood "how I saved some people with salad" contests anytime soon, but maybe you could demand more keynote addresses for this sort of thing in between all the schmoozing and duck fat at your conferences and picnics and ski fests? Maybe I could see a post or two about the kitchen you helped build on that trip to wherever you ate those fish tacos right on the boat that I had to look at 75 photos of?

I helped pick a few thousand pounds of citrus this weekend for a group that does this. These are the stories that I want to hear about.

I know you think we're cut from different cloth, you and I, but listen here

You're a lot closer to emptying septic hoses with me than you think. Shitter's full, Clark. Let's get to cleaning.

Love,

Eddie.

Grandma See. Baller.

One of the worst things about the holiday season is the invitations. It's nice to be asked somewhere to be reminded that you are not alone in this overwhelming life and that people love you and care about you. Also, sometimes your boss has a party and there is free booze. BUT. Being down to your last penny and not being able to bring a hostess gift is an awful feeling. NO, it is not required, most of your friends will tell you and NO, please, don't go to any trouble. You know how it feels when everyone is lining up bottles of Hennesey and amaryllis on the sideboard and you're all Hey! Off-brand vinho verde from Grocery Outlet! Everyone will know and a wilting violet from the dollar store is thoughtful but very Lena Dunham wrapped in green cellophane.
Know what else costs about $2? $3 if you buy a little box and ribbon?

TOFFEE

Who ISN'T a Goddamned caramel junkie? If you saw the inside of my mouth you'd think I'd done a bit of  meth at some point but I can tell you that the addiction was Heath bars and Sugar Babies.

After years of failing miserably and buying varying grades of candy thermometer, I had honestly resigned myself to feeling bad every year for paying for something that I KNEW cost nothing to make. It's like sourdough bread. $4 for a really good loaf of a quarter's worth of flour and salt. That See's Candy can charge $20 per pound is crazytalk and those thugs in their little pressed pinafores should be ashamed that a Scotchmallow costs $1.75.

This summer one of my favorite people on Twitter, thepeche , went to one of those little wing-dings that some of you go to and he started talking about this magic toffee that another very nice lady makes.

I trust this man. He had a contest where I won a bunch of fancy chocolate and he knows a lot about Little House on the Prairie.  He seems like a very sensible person who wouldn't act like something unattainable was just a snap, so I thought "Why not?" Except for the 100 plus degree temperature which is terrible for candy-making and explains pralines. I tried it, caring less about the fastidiousness of a thermometer and just watched and applied the tiny bit of food science I know about sugar. IT WORKED.  

This will make a lovely hostess gift. No one will know you are broke. They will only think you are cool as hell for being able to make this little bit of magic yourself.

Recipe adapted with swears and less finesse from Rachel at LaFujiMama .

2 sticks butter
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
3/4 cup chocolate chips. Your choice of color. I mix milk and dark and I buy them in bulk so I only have to spend about 75 cents at a time.
Whatever sort of nut remnants from other baking or dried fruits or coconut or pumpkin seeds or whatever. No more than 1/4 cup. This is optional.

1 2-quart stainless saucepan , the heavier the bottom, the better. DO NOT USE NON-STICK
1 slotted stirring spoon, preferably a nice, cheap wooden one that the sugar will come off of, easier, later.
parchment paper or aluminum foil that has been lightly greased. A silicone baking sheet is the best. They even have them at most grocery stores now and they aren't more than a few dollars.

I have the crappiest electric stove ever. It never goes above 3. You do you.

Line a sheet pan (cookie sheet) with whatever above material you have. If it's not a silicone mat it needs to be greased or sprayed. LIGHTLY.  Dollar store has cans of all the delicious flavors. Usually PAM. Don't spend $5 on this stuff at a real grocery. It's all terrible, but very cheap and effective and you don't use it all the time so don't get too creeped out. Nothing "organic" that they turn into aerosol is that great for you, either, so forget those. Sprinkle the little scraps of whatever has been hiding in the corner of the drawer on the sheet and spread them into a square-ish shape.

On low heat, melt the sugar, butter and vanilla together. Stir every minute and a half (approx. the time it takes you to click over to Twitter, read a few, answer one, and click back) for about 20 seconds each time. When it separates, ignore it. it will be fine. When it looks like weird, lumpy paste, do not give up hope. Right here is where those thermometer bastards make their money and you don't need them. Sugar is dependable. If you heat it, it will melt and if you heat it too fast it will burn. So slowly keep heating and stirring and you will be right as a motherfucker when this little program is over. When it starts to brown on the sides, make sure to watch it very carefully. When it really starts to darken, stir, stir, stir and when it's the color of Shemar Moore, turn it off. Do not be distracted by thoughts of Shemar Moore. I have now made this difficult. Leave it there while the burner cools, stir the holy Jesus out of it to smooth it completely and pour it over the nut scraps. Make a "N" motion back and forth and try to fill in all the spaces. When it has cooled for a few seconds, tilt the pan like that board game with the ball you try to keep out of the hole until it's filled.
When it has cooled for one more minute, spread the chocolate chips over the top. Wait for them to melt from the heat and spread the chocolate evenly over the top of the toffee. You can add more nuts now or crushed things like fruits or salts or peppermint. I like more coconut so it becomes a food group.

Let it cool completely and gently turn over the sheet it's on, holding it with one hand to keep it from falling off. Do this over another sheetpan or sheet of paper or foil to catch the nuts. Gently crack the back so that it breaks into pieces, turn these back over, again, GENTLY, and either place them in a nicely lined tin or box or into a large plastic IKEA container that you can hide from your husband.

*If you are new to my blog, I don't take pictures of food because there is a picture of every single food ever made in the history of the world on Google by people who are qualified to do this. I am merely qualified to teach you how to cook. 

Alms for the Paranoid

Sunday night at the eating disorder clinic was a real hot spot. The nurse would pick a film and we would all gather in the lounge with our ice water to partake in an evening of cinematic wonder. We were just getting into the good part of "The Karen Carpenter Story"  when a panicked voice came over the hospital intercom. "CODE BLUE, ER. CODE BLUE, ER" is what we heard and it got the staff moving quicker than I'd seen during the six eternal days I'd been there. Especially Lynn the male nurse whose job rounding us up seemed to really be no job at all. Mostly him lying down on the couch in the TV room close enough to the nurse's station until dinner. Then it was go time as he walked the perimeter of the room looking for signs of junkie behavior. Amanda the anorexic, endlessly trying to sneak food into her napkin.  Barbara with the beard always asking " are you gonna eat that?" even though it was forbidden to share or trade. We were on "food plans" all of us little nutpacks, and no squirrel was allowed an extra almond or turkey slice or plain yogurt cup. Period.

I used to think I was in control and I liked it. I now understand that is not the point of rehab. Every morning I would tell them I was taking my shower downstairs (only 2 on our wing) next to the cafeteria. I'm sure it never occurred to them, because it was closed until 7 and it was only 5:30, but the vending machines stood sentry outside the locked doors waiting to give a girl what she needed and there was a Snickers breakfast every morning before the Grape-Nuts.
My life. My rules.

The disembodied voice was panicked as it turns out, because a very upset man whose wife had died recently as the result of what he deemed to be the hospital's ER negligence, was unkindly shooting people to death three floors of unlocked doors below us. It's a fun short story that ends with 11 white girls huddled together in the one room that had a (puny little push)lock uncertain if our last meal on Earth was really going to be water-poached snapper and some grapes. What cruel God would do that to someone whose life revolved around chili fries?
The sniper was killed, the smoke cleared out and I called my mother screeching at her to "Get down here and GET ME NOW!! RIGHT NOW!!!!!! "

"Oh, Marisa" came the response, "You're staying right where you are. What are the chances of that happening again?"

This is the same woman who once told me we were going to Fosselman's for ice cream and instead took me to Ingleside Mental Hospital because she thought I had issues. (HELLO? MC FLY? mayhaps YOU'RE my issue????) so my hope for Carol Brady to come through for me was a little far-reaching, but still.
She turned out to be right however, and the rest of my time there was spent without incident. Or weight loss. Those Snickers add up.

23 years later, we're playing Vegas odds again and I keep hearing that conversation. If you've had a stillborn, I don't care who says what Deepak Chopra-like thing, it is impossible to be anything but freaked out every single minute of every single day. Since I'm only sleeping about 4 hours, these days are ETERNAL. It's up to me to be optimistic. Not Nick or Evan.  Not the dead baby or the live one. Me. My uterus doesn't belong to me, it belongs to the molecules. And whatever comes out of me in 6 weeks is a figment of all of our imaginations.
Will lightning strike twice? Doesn't matter and if it does I guess I cry for three more years and consider myself lucky the universe thinks I'm so magnetic. I got this.

"Life is a struggle, so go hard in the paint" - Eddie Huang

99 Bosses. Raised By Wolves.

Are you fat? You suck. God help the cross-eyed and the retarded. Everyone is a terrorist, pedophile, thief or liberal. Sports and show biz are the only professions worth getting into.

This is my parent's record collection, the one I listened to my whole life. They throw these little gems on whenever I make the mistake of trying to have a conversation with them. In the past few years they got a little jiggy and added some new tracks. My dad loves the one where he "prays for Obama to be assassinated every night" and my mother grooves to the secular soundtrack of those loony Christians who believe that in the after times the Dalai Lama will be on a dinghy to hell while George Bush gets to fuck an angel a day for eternity.
They are always asking me why I'm so unhappy. Um...

When you teach your children to not trust anyone or anything you get me. When you teach them to believe in goodness and tell them they are beautiful in their own way you get Nick.  I tend to be a hate machine who slags it all.  Nick loves people and animals and doesn't go out of his way looking for mass murderers at the Safeway.  You should see how good he sleeps at night.
It's exhausting for me to be the asshole. Really.
At 26 I got a second chance at being parented. I am one of the lucky ones.

I only lasted as bakery manager for a few months. RCKCNDY took over as my office and the Beastie Boys checked my head for job commitment and found an ounce of Ak-47 instead.

After my awkward firing (Joan, the owner cried while telling me how I sucked and she was sorry because she really, really liked me) I was left with a month of severance, a Tony Robbins book (really) and a need to pay rent so I did what any desperate girl with no specific job skills does..... I started cleaning houses. I know what you were thinking. I wish. If ONLY I could have gotten up the nerve to strip. I did walk past the Deja Vu once or twice, but it's just not me.
Cleaning someone else's crap out of a toilet is dehumanizing and zen-like all at the same time. By zen I don't mean that happy trance place either, I mean you have to reconcile that it is all the same in your head when it's a stranger's leftovers staring you in the face.

ANYWAYS.

My adventures in housekeeping were a brief experiment wherein I would sit on your couch watching 90210 reruns while I had a snack. I'd get up for the last hour and speed-clean, grab the check and go. This is what your cleaning lady is doing right now if you aren't spy-camming her. It lasted all of three weeks until I climbed some steps in Laurelhurst and met my second mother.

Ladies and Gentleman, it is my absolute pleasure to introduce you to the fantastic  Milari Hare

It is from Milari that I learned to drink from a glass instead of plastic, to use a real napkin, to gladly throw open the shades first thing in the morning to let all the light in. It is with Milari that I learned how to weed a garden, pick a dahlia, buy an artichoke. Milari lives "Don't Worry Be Happy" with every cell of her five-foot tall, marabou-clad frame. She walks the walk. When I am around her, I do too. She's what I miss most about Seattle.

By the end of that work day I had procured a job as a nanny, quit the housekeeping service, and begun the long, smelly road to chef-dom.  Follow the yellow brick road.

The Ghost and Mrs. S

Around the corner from my Belltown crib was a sketchy pizza joint. Right behind the statue of Chief Seattle. The kind of place where pictures of every famous Italian-American blend un-seamlessly with cheap prints of gondolas and the Coliseum. Run by the worst sort of owner, the kind who frequently appears on Kitchen Nightmares blaming the staff for his failure while GR digs rotten chicken out of the walk-in. The manager was a dead-ringer for Sly Stallone in the first Rocky, before surgery prettied him up. A few drops of sweat were always right at the end of his nose ready to season the food. I ate there once and got food poisoning which should have been an indicator that I never wanted to get behind THAT line, but for a few weeks one summer when I needed some work, I caved to the perpetual "Help Wanted" sign and joined the ranks of the rotten sauce that dwelled therein. 

There is a painting of a small bouquet of purple flowers next to the vanity in Barbara Sinatra's bathroom. They are in a vase tied with a ribbon with a sky blue background. It's inscription, in tiny crooked letters, reads "to BAS love FAS"

4th of July reminds me of beach. Beach reminds me of Malibu. Malibu reminds me of living in Frank Sinatra's house.
Let me say that again in case your jaw didn't drop and you didn't get a little impressed. I lived in Frank-to-tha-mother-effing-Sinatra's house. Cooked for his widow. An ant moves a rubber tree plant.

I spent a snowy spring driving back and forth between Pilchuck Glass School, where I was cooking and my apartment in West Seattle where I catered Friday night shabbat for the Jew Crew, when an unexpected turn in the love department sent me reeling. A certain smug son-of-a-biscuit-eater named MICHAEL DAVID NELSON (waiter/glassblower, fuck yeah, I  name names) told me I was a loser who would "stay trapped in her room forever" waiting for him. Really dude? I threw aside ten years of hard work, clients and friends and went running back to LA. Trapped in a room to be sure, but a fancy-ass one with an ocean view and a charge account at Hows where the mangoes cost $6.99 and NO ONE EVEN CARES.

I never realized the clout the name Sinatra carries until I told people where I worked. I was pretty punk rock and even though we've all heard the songs, celebrities were all the same to me. I didn't realize they have their own caste system and Ol' Blue Eyes is plunked right on the top of that heap. Even in death. Chairman of the Board for a reason, yo.

Me and the Mrs. had a routine.
When she woke up she buzzed me.
A trip down the leopard print staircase to the living room and the monster steel shades that covered the house would be lifted, the stereo flipped on with disc after disc of Guess-Who ready to go. She listened to him all day long, the sound of his voice keeping him close to her, I suppose. Imagine the greatest crooner in history singing to you daily in that magic voice. Then imagine it drowning slowly in a sea of dementia and despair until it is silenced altogether. You couldn't blame her for wanting to hear it. Except for the fact that it drove you apeshit after the third day.

After the newspapers were gathered and the dogs let out for the walker to pick up, a Martha sort of moment would occur with oats and berries and hot lemon water on white porcelain and I would wait at the foot of her bed until she decided what she wanted for lunch. There was no menu planning with Mrs. S. If she said she felt like a Honey Baked Ham, then you enjoyed the hour and back drive down the coast to Santa Monica to get the lady her hunk of meat. I assure you, they have twenty different places in Malibu to get some damned ham, but it needs to be cooked on the bone, natch and she likey their cranberry mustard.  She would eat 2 whole slices before tiring of the taste and I would be forcing it on Hector and Eva the rest of the week.
Sometime after lunch she would hip me to her evening plans and I would either be back in the car in search of something special or I'd be loading up my tray with snacks from the larder for a big night in front of the TV. For reals. A larder. Have you seen one? It's a huge thing that looks like a pantry, but is humidity controlled. Built just for them to keep their cut onions wrapped in paper towels so they wouldn't lose their taste. Not kidding. I have never seen another one and I've been in a lot of fancy kitchens.

Five o'clock was crudite and cocktails. "Mr. S's Martini" Extra dirty. Of course. Forever a reminder that no matter who we are, the same three ingredients make up our mixed drinks. It's a good lesson and one of which I'm sure the Chairman would approve. A few slices of carrot, radish, jicama.  Overpriced heirloom tomatoes. I don't know how much Hows makes off their produce markups, but dollars to doughnuts that man is driving his Murcielago down PCH with a hooker right now. 

On the nights that she didn't go out, she'd bring her tray out by the beach and have me keep her company for a bit. Am I in a movie? I don't know, is Danny DeVito next door having drinks with Robert DeNiro?
Getting relationship advice from this dame was incredible. The best, paraphrased, amounts to "if you marry a cheater, instead of throwing his ass out, do your hair, put on make-up, cook him dinner and remind him why he wants to come home to you instead of that ho'".  Maybe a little fifties, but I now appreciate the sentiment as a married woman with furniture I would not want to have to split up.

One afternoon she came down to the kitchen to show me how to make pasta Mr. S's mom's way. The sacred Dolly. Who taught her son, who taught his wife who was about to teach me. It seemed very special and Italian and I am sure there are restaurant owners in Jersey who would weep at the chance to experience a cooking lesson in this particular kitchen.

I've eaten a lot of noodles, I've made quite a few. I've had them fresh from the masters, in sauces of truffle and caviar.  But Frank Sinatra's pasta sounded like the angels might be carrying that recipe card around in a gilded frame and I was lucky enough to be there for that heralding, that day.

She took off her rock of a ring, started pouring flour into a pile on the counter and instructed me in her stock method. Not my favorite. I don't think a boiled raw chicken, carrot and onion are going to get you anywhere but Ireland and who the hell eats THAT food? But I did it. I was drooling in anticipation. This was FRANK'S FAVORITE after all, it was bound to be the most italian-y pasta-y best thing ever.  God, I get my hopes up easily.

We rolled out the dough, hand-cutting scraggly long noodles, dropped them into simmering chicken stock, and fished them out a minute later. Tossed with butter and parmesan, they were the most disgusting noodles I have ever eaten.

If you Google Mrs. S, you will read many shitty things written by his daughters and jealous ex-girlfriends. Things that suggest she didn't love him, that she kept him away from his friends, that she was a gold-digger who somehow facilitated his death by not getting him the care he needed.

I would argue that the painting on the wall tells a better story about their love than these attempts to slander. I would say after living in the palace for awhile and getting to know Frank from the vibe of those who loved him, that he was a king on this earth. And I can unequivocally swear, 100 percent, without a doubt, that the best pasta I've ever had, was from that guido in Seattle with the sweat dripping off his nose.

Guido Pasta or what I call, STOP WITH THAT FUCKING BECHAMEL PLEASE.

Boil, cook, drain a pound of pasta. Whatever your kid doesn't have a fit over.
Melt half a stick of butter in a pan, saute a big clove of chopped garlic for 30 seconds, add a pint of whipping cream.
When it starts to break, add noodles and stir around for a minute.
As it starts to simmer add a cup of grated parmesan.
Stir around again to emulsify.
Add bacon iffen there happens to be any cooked laying around.
Tons of pepper, little salt b/c of cheese.

Eat it now. Right now. Don't do anything else. Especially don't consider the fat content. Next time make twice as much, because you won't want to share.