Family Feast

My nephew makes a mean Bloody Mary. Everyone loved this year’s Craignog (which, after years of perfecting, I tweaked once again), but sometimes you want something less dreamy and pillowy, something to make your eyebrows stand up and take notice. Erik’s Bloody Mary, with the best swizzle stick (a skewer with small bites of celery alternating with stuffed green olives) and a boatload of ingredients, a couple of them secret, was amazing.

As was his turkey. Erik has, in the past few years, been bitten by the gourmet bug. He runs a successful pawn shop, then goes home to make schnitzel with chanterelles in a cream sauce. We compared notes on braised short ribs and osso bucco, and discussed his plans for a turkey stock once the carcass had been stripped, more or less.

It was a huge turkey, which often isn’t advised because they tend to be dry. He brined it for a day, and then stuffed it with herbs and lemons and oranges and apples and . . . I lost track, it’s a long list. And it was perfect: juicy, tender, richly flavored. It was masterful. I carved.

When we sat down to dinner, someone decided we should say Grace, and thankfully no one looked at me this time, but rather at Jerry. My brother is married to Janet, who has a sister named Dottie, who is married to Jerry. Dottie (or, as the kids’ placecard had it, dotty) and Jerry are staunchly Evangelical Christians. My nephew Erik is an atheist, though I recently discovered it’s probably more like Buddhist atheism or even Camus-style Christian atheism than a disavowal of any larger reality. So when everyone looked to Jerry to give the blessing, Erik suggested that since we have such a wide variety of belief systems represented at the table, perhaps it would be better if we each shared what we are thankful for this year. (I know that’s a tradition in other households, but I can’t recall ever doing it before.)

And Erik was right, we did have a wide range of beliefs. Some leftwing, some rightwing, most somewhere in the middle; some religiously conservative, some decidedly wackadoo (Erik’s mother-in-law recently paid untold sums of money to study with an organization to become “certified” as a shaman; which is why, perhaps, we have almost no common ground for discussing anything of import, though to be fair, she was on her best behavior yesterday), most somewhere in the middle.

Was it simply that I hadn’t been able to attend family gatherings in recent years because of Mom’s health? Was it a family coming together after a loss? Was it just we’ve all grown and changed, and somehow, grown closer in the process? Whatever it was, it was pleasant, and lovely, and comfortable.

I ate some Bad-for-Me Stuff — a little bread dressing, a pumpkin muffin, a slice of the rum cake (mainly to see if I had ruined it or not, and I hadn’t) — but I didn’t do too badly, and now I’m back to a paleo diet. My body is liking this. My mind is liking this. I was until yesterday getting withdrawl headaches, which will pass once the opioids and the gluten and the yeasties are well and truly out of my system.

And today I get to taste some wheat-free beer at our local brewery, then come home and clean a kitchen that should probably just be firebombed instead.

Giving thanks is good.

Change of Seasons

You know it’s fall when the Gala apples are better than sex and the cinnamon brooms are back in stock at the grocery store. Now, it’s important to have such cues here in Florida because we generally don’t get autumn temperatures until January, and then only for a month or so. Maybe the last week in December, but I can recall a number of Christmases spent around my brother’s pool, sweltering and unhappy.

Mom and I loved autumn best of the seasons. Perhaps it was because the cool, dry air felt so invigorating and freeing; perhaps it was because we were born less than a month apart at this time of year.

Today I told Tanya, the young woman who cuts my hair and used to cut Mom’s, that we had lost her. She began to cry. “I really loved her,” she said.

Today was also the first grocery shopping trip since she died. That’s not significant in itself, but I’m finding the times I miss Mom most keenly are the little moments when we’d be doing something mundane together. I’d always call her from the grocery store, and she’d say “I knew it was you!” and I’d tantalize her with some new tasty thing I had found; she’d ooh and aah appropriately, and we’d say we loved one another, and when I got home I’d cut up pieces of juicy apple for her, or let her taste the pot roast gravy.

And whenever I’d travel somewhere (this was years ago, when she could be left alone for a few days at a time), I’d call her from my motel room the moment I set my bags down. So of course I wanted to call her each time I checked into the motel on last week’s trip, even though I was traveling to and from her funeral.

But then I go into Mom’s room and see the boxes of medicine that I have to go through and get rid of. Yesterday the medical equipment people picked up her oxygen compressor and the back-up oxygen tanks. And I look at that bed which had held her for so long, and I sigh happily that she is no longer captive to those shackles, those burdens.

So I guess it’s appropriate that we both start new lives now, in the autumn. “In my end is my beginning,” wrote T.S. Eliot:

We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise.

Day Two

Yesterday was Day One in several significant ways. The Great Funeral Trip is done, and Mom is resting with Dad in Maryland. Now I have an empty house with all the chaos from the previous weeks still in evidence, and little time to make any sense of it since I have a bunch of work deadlines this week, not to mention Mom’s famous rum cake and my infamous CraigNog to make for the family Thanksgiving gathering.

I’m still at that stage where everything reminds me of Mom, or I say, “Mom would really love that,” or I turn to talk to her but see only a vacant chair or bed. I’m not sad or lonely, exactly, but I’m keenly feeling the lack of her physical presence.

At the same time, I feel a sudden push forward, the motivation and power to make some changes in my life that I have wished for or even attempted (and failed at) in the past. One, as I mentioned recently, is my trying to excise bread and other things made with flour from my diet. It ain’t easy. Wheat has opioids — opium-like substances that influence the brain’s endorphin receptors. These opioid peptides are physically addictive and cause asthma, obesity, and (as might be expected from a substance chemically similar to morphine) apathy.

It turns out that plants use different tactics to scare off attackers. Some plants contain poison; others just anesthetize their attackers, as wheat does with opioid peptides.

Priests in ancient Egypt knew the power of wheat opioids. They ate bread to cause hallucinations, and placed a bread poultice under bandages to ease the pain of wounds. The Roman rulers knew that the people wouldn’t rise up against them as long as they were fed bread and kept entertained — the old “bread and circuses” approach that is the mainstay of modern culture.

(Interesting side note: The Roman government offered a variety of popular entertainments to keep people’s attention diverted from embarrassing political scandals and messy wars: free or cheap unhealthy food; public baths; gladiator spectacles; exotic animals; chariot races in the Circus Maxiumus and sports competitions; and theater performances. Now we have fast food, body pampering, reality shows, high-dollar shopping, sports, and movies and TV. Has nothing changed in 2000 years?)

Obviously I want to lose weight again and regain my health (and while you couldn’t tell it by looking at me, I had lost about 65 pounds before the funeral, though I gained some back on this trip). I hope to get down to 165 pounds, ultimately. And that’s a long, long, LONG road ahead, though I’m no longer setting a timed goal for myself. In fact, at this point, I’ve decided not to set any weight-based goals at all, not even tiny incremental ones.

Nope, I realized that if my goal were based on weight loss or even fat loss (which is different), I would be perpetuating the same pattern I’ve failed at over and over. In fact, I think I’ve come up with an approach that can’t fail — because the very concept of “failure” doesn’t exist. My goal is to create new habits, new patterns of behavior that will help support my health.

So my goal is not to “walk x distance every day,” but rather to “start moving my body more, and make that movement a habit.” My goal is not to establish and keep a perfect paleo diet, but rather to start eating more healthy foods and fewer unhealthy ones, and establish that pattern as a habit. When I deviate from these new patterns, it won’t be failure, it won’t be breaking a diet (how violent that sounds!) or falling off the exercise wagon (again with the violence!), it will be a recognition that new habits are built gradually through repeatedly doing things differently than you’ve done them before.

It will be uncomfortable, because you’re moving out of the well-worn groove in the road and traveling on new and uncertain ground. And the cart will occasionally slip back into that old rut, because it’s well established and familiar and comfortable. That’s not failure; it’s a geographical feature of the road. It just means I need to steer the cart back up onto the new, untrodden ground again. And if I find a new part of the road that works well for me, next time I’ll try to follow the same tracks, and eventually create a new groove. (Having spent time in Vermont and St. Croix, where there are still many dirt roads, has been a helpful visual and sensory reminder of this approach.)

So yesterday I ate no bread, and I made some good food choices. Today — Day Two — I will try to repeat that pattern, and perhaps make some even better food choices. Yesterday I moved a bit, though I was stiff and achy, and still am today. So I’ll drink more water and move a bit more, and I still won’t call it exercise, since that’s too frightening a concept.

During my last winter in Vermont, Bear taught me that I can walk on icy surfaces better if I walk pigeon-toed and I lumber along slowly. Now Elephant is teaching me that you’ll get there eventually even if you just plod along, and that it feels really good to simply sway back and forth from time to time. It gets the blood flowing and loosens everything up. (Elephant also says it’s OK to cry or trumpet from time to time if you need to. It’s good to feel things, even if it hurts sometimes.)

And tomorrow we’ll see what Day Three brings.