No Coventry for Old Mom

In which our Hero stands a while in his mother’s kitchen and looks out the window at the winter ghosts of marigolds

My parents returned this past week from a month in their homeland. Today, as we came back from church, my father sat in the passenger seat and suddenly started to talk.

My grandmother’s two sisters are lost in time. They’re alive, but their minds are gone. The youngest is walking, but she has no idea where she’s walking to, and no idea who people are. The older sister is just a boneless lump on her bed. Move her and she’ll keep from getting bedsores, but prop her up and she has no idea where she is or who. And my grandmother herself is starting to lose time. She forgets if she’s eaten. She doesn’t remember things my father gave her earlier in the day.

We’ve already been through this once. My maternal grandmother, before her passing, lost her time. The last time I saw her, she recognized me as my father, and recognized fewer and fewer as time passed.

Now my father is faced with a very tangible sign of time. We all know his mother is getting older. We all know our time with her is finite. But now my father has very suddenly lost two aunts who are right in front of him, and he had to leave his mom knowing that this time, any time, could be the last time she smiles over her boy.

And in the car, almost as afterthought, my father is sharing a little bit of his grief. And I’m a little glad that he’s sharing with me, for the connection, for the relief it may offer him. But on the flip-side, it also means that my quiet father who has always sheltered me is now laying his burden on his son.

I can’t speak where that thought leads me. But it weighs heavy.

My parents are back after a month away. And despite much more careful effort than the last time, despite sweeps of the house, there was still fruits a rotting in corners of the garage and a missed container of something fermenting behind the condiments in the fridge. (sigh)

On the other hand, nearly all of the plants made it through their separation from my mother. I’m proud of that. Didn’t water too many plastic ones. Everybody else was maybe a little thirsty, but still stable and green.

And suddenly I’m driven to the margins again. I had the run of the house and sat in various rooms, doing various things, some my own, some for each of my parents, some for my father’s business. I was a host, unleashed and unfurled, and now with no more than their presence as a gentle repulsion on my sensitivity, I withdraw. I shelter behind my walls.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know why my expansion was only internal. I don’t know what to do with this sudden reconstraint when I’d reached a modicum of peace with my space.

I quite enjoyed being a grown-up for a while. Perhaps I should be grateful to get to play so many for the short time.

I made a tofu stir-fry with a hand made pomegranate glaze. On a whim, without more than a few tips from Nocturne on how to cook the tofu since that was my first time. It was a spectacular and joyful failure, but I’m delighted that I have reached a point in my cooking where my comfort and flexibility let me be spontaneous. The mistake was the tofu, it was the wrong kind altogether, and that chemical taste that some tofu can have here overwhelmed the soy and the pomegranate.

But I did that, and weirdly, not just once, but every meal I cook came with the awed discovery that, hey, I can make tasty things that I like, and hey, I really enjoy cooking, and hey, I am cheerfully willing to spend hours in the kitchen at play, and hey, goddamn it, how can I never make this chili without burning my hand at the blender step!

Liberating a pomegranate (what is the verb, peeling? Doesn’t seem sufficient. Unloading, perhaps) is something I don’t frequently do, so there’s a small measure of uncertainty. But at the same time, there’s a pleasure to it, a joy in the simple physicality, as much as peeling an orange and tearing it’s flesh from the sections. The arils heap in the bowl like a hoard of garnets, perhaps. And I’ve never juiced them in my life, and not having a better idea, I just mash my hand into the bowl.

Some of them yield and some of them down, and soon the juice and pulp obscure the seeds. This cannot be the best way to do this, but I mash them a few at a time, bunching my fingertips into a birdsbeak press. This works better, but my fingers grow tired, and not muscle tired, but joint tired, strange, unfamiliar aches that fight against my will and my perseverance.

For a little while, I was determined to flense every scrap of flesh from the seed, but I cannot succeed. I would have to do them one by one, and instead I press with my fingers, and then I gather masses of seedpulp and just squeeze my fist to strain what juices I can.

And in the bowl, with a few bits of skin and pulp remaining, is the juices of a hoard of garnets, for rendering, for reducing, for pouring into my food. It was likely not best done, or even well done, but it was done, by me, and I feel it as a milestone accomplishment.

Despite, after all that, ending up throwing most of it away.

There is no point. I don’t know what to write, or how to write, so I just thought I’d write. I’d hoped to recover the art of pointing.

Perhaps my fingers are still more sore than I realized.

Perhaps not.