ON THE ULTIMATE COMFORT FOODS, PANDEMIC TIME AND NOTHING TIME, AND A MAINTENANCE STATE OF BEING
Friday April 3 2020
Dear Sarah,
Congratulations on your life news! I am so thrilled to hear that you will be teaching in the fall! When you and I talked this week, somehow we didn’t make our way to your news (world-country-state-local events took center stage, it would seem) and I am bookmarking it for the next time we chat. I want to hear more!
This week I’ve found myself, my actions, coalescing around a kind of maintenance state of being. I wrote in my notebook: maintenance // food and eating and cooking and washing and exercise and sleeping, and as much work as needs to get done but no more. This soothed me. I read a list of mental health wellness tips during a time of quarantine this week (it came to me in another way but it appears to be making the rounds) a part of which essentially said, whatever you are doing and feeling now is all right. It described giving yourself radical self-acceptance — accepting your emotions and not being hard on yourself in this strange, unpredictable, unprecedented time. This also soothed me. I am going to hold onto the concept of maintenance for the moment, when I find myself looking for a signpost as to what may come next, and how to figure out how to be.
I’m looking back at our letters from last week and I see that I was just getting into my spirit of comfort eating, and this week I’ve continued that approach. It’s been a good week of eating. In concert with the cooking and eating there are so many more dishes to be done than ever before, I find myself washing dishes multiple times a day, and we run the dishwasher regularly, maybe every other day. So many dishes to eat so much food, prepared by ourselves! This is the first time in our lives, M and I, that we have simply made all our meals or eaten all our meals at our home, ever. Today is April 3, and I last went shopping on Tuesday March 24. Before that I went shopping on Wednesday and Thursday March 11 and 12. We last saw people in person in a social way on Saturday March 14, which is also the last time that I ate food that someone else had cooked, when we got take-out pizza and enjoyed it with our friends, all of us being careful not to touch each other or each other’s food or drinking glasses or unnecessary surfaces (in my home I can of course touch the surfaces, but I think our friends were careful not to touch our surfaces more than they needed to, probably for their own health and for our health as well).
There is a soothing feeling in just focusing on the work of keeping ourselves fed and essentially alive and healthy. And since the times we eat have become focal points in our self-entertainment, we are also eating things that are delicious or new to us, or — if they are somehow sub-delicious — they are at least homemade and sustaining us. I am thinking about a three-bean soup we made this week that usually calls for spinach added at the end, but I had bought collard greens because we’d been enjoying them in other meals lately, and I added the collards to the soup, but they didn’t get quite as soft as I’d hoped, even with twenty minutes of simmering, and we both felt that they wanted some more fattiness or richness, the way you often eat collards with something meaty or bacon-y. It was a fine soup but it wasn’t going to win any awards! And yet we were fed.
Wednesday this week was a high point, as we made big bowls of linguine with homemade spaghetti sauce and drank red wine. A big bowl of spaghetti is one of my ultimate comfort foods. Then I was driven to bake something, and had been eyeing a bag of butterscotch chips I bought more than a year ago, when I was on a multiple-grocery-store-quest to find them, and once I did I bought two bags because it had taken so much effort to find them. So I made muesli butterscotch chip cookies, using an oatmeal scotchies recipe and replacing oatmeal with muesli. They were delicious! Wednesday was thus peak comfort food day. Yesterday we made Indian butter chickpeas and added a block of paneer, cubed and fried, and it was very tasty, like an Indian version of the comfort spaghetti we’d eaten the day before. We are going to feed ourselves through this pandemic, and plan our shopping list for the next two-week trip, and think about how to buy the right kinds of fresh things so that we can enjoy them and not let anything go to waste.
I cannot believe you had to confront the Santa Claus Question during a global pandemic, and in the month of March no less! Perhaps if you are a child and you come across opportunities right now to suss out what is real and what is not, you want to take your chances to get things out in the open. I’ll be curious to hear and see how kids respond to this change in school rhythms over time — will this generation of kids be extra creative or entrepreneurial, less bound by and to the patterns and demands of our school systems? Coupled with the skyrocketing costs of even public institutions of higher education, will kids and teens take lessons from this moment, finding ways to learn what they want and need to learn without investing in hefty certificates from colleges and universities? I don’t intend to diminish the value of in-person education — I’m just curious how we’ll see the ripple effects of this time play out. There are so many ways to wonder how or if we’ll go back to living just like we did before, once we come through this.
With that, I’m going to wind down this week with some comfort food and a good night’s sleep! I hope you have a lovely weekend ahead of you. I’ve been curious to know if you still get to enjoy your birthday-gifted Saturday mornings during the pandemic!
Until soon,
Yours,
Eva
April 2, 2020
Dear Eva,
We spoke on the phone just a few days ago, but in Pandemic Time (which as you aptly pointed out on our phone call this week, is a lot like dog years), it might as well have been last month. I wonder how you have fared, how these last days-feeling-like-weeks have gone for you. Things here were really quite lovely if I let myself see it that way. I had harried moments, no doubt, but overall, the scene was calm, the children spent hours upon hours playing outside wielding sticks in character, and we enjoyed a midweek birthday car parade for my brother-in-law with lots of honking and the birthday song sung in proper socially distant formation on the lawn.
I didn’t get much exercise or even movement today, so just before sitting down to write this letter, I was walking in a circle through the house, carrying my phone and listening to an old interview of Mary Ruefle. The podcast episode was recorded years ago, but everything you read and listen to right now takes on an entirely new form when it is plopped into today’s world. She spoke of her goal to have one day each week where she never touches her door knob, just stays inside “wasting time” as she puts it. If you forget about the stress of global suffering and the looming threat of societal breakdown, this time in the world gives us lots of those days, whether we like it or not.
I was thinking today about how Pandemic Time has a lot to teach us about presence. In our homes right now, we have virtually nothing but presence to give each other. I always endeavor to be a good mom and a good partner, but in normal times, I consider myself fulfilling this in many ways, including through my quiet hours in an empty house when I sort out some thoughts and often do some writing. These days, it is almost purely through my presence that I am able to fulfill my role as mom and partner. I am here with my kids, and with Bill, 24 hours per day, and this is what I have to offer them. For those we love outside of our own homes, our presence is the one thing we really cannot give each other. So we find ways to fill this gap—sending emails, texts, letters to each other, or finding new solace in the substitute of digital or even just audio presence in a loved one’s life. We are not there, but we are finding that we can still be there.
This reminds me of a different episode of that same podcast, which I listened to yesterday while I did some writing. That one was an old interview with Sarah Manguso. She mentioned an exercise she has done with her students, where she comes into class and says nothing for 20 minutes. Once it is over, she then asks them to write about those 20 minutes. And then they take turns reading about how everyone in the class experienced that “nothing time,” which of course is not really nothing time at all. The minutes were teeming with Stuff, differently-felt and differently-experienced by everyone in the room. Nothing happened, but many things happened.
Even before this global catastrophe began unfolding, I often would think about how to ensure you have a life that matters to someone other than yourself. To me, it feels like the essential question. If we know the answer, then we know where to focus our energy, our precious time. I think part of me has always been drawn to the practice of writing because it results in artifacts that can outlive us. In other words, it feels more lasting than presence, which disappears even before we die, slipping between our fingers just after a given moment passes. But today I happened upon a beautiful Twitter thread, a son paying tribute to his father who passed away from covid-19. “My dad was a great man. There are no buildings named after him, he left behind no fortune, and there are no books that tell his story. He was not great in the way we often try to define the term - he was great in that he was such a *good* man - good to his core, unfailingly good.”
It reminded me of a conversation with my dad that I wrote about a few weeks ago, in which he said, without an ounce of sadness, that he long ago gave up on any idea of having an impact on the world, or on the idea that people would write about him when he died. He is wrong, of course. He has had an impact on my world, and I will write about him when he dies. (I write about him often even now!) It occurred to me today that I have been thinking about life and impact too literally, forgetting my own lived experience of carrying around the presence of people who I love and who have loved me long after I am no longer physically with them. Presence in the flesh is fleeting, but people stay with us.
Good night, my dear friend. I look forward to reading your words tomorrow!
Yours,
Sarah