Church Avenue Chomp

One of Henry’s two babysitters is thin — very thin. In fact, I have never ever seen her eat even one morsel of food, although I have known her for more than a year and we have spent a lot of time together, since I work at home.

I’ve even met her best friend on a few occasions, a girl who looks as if she eats on a pretty regular basis. Like, maybe every two hours. But, who am I to judge? Or at least to judge out loud?

“You’re fat,” Diya tells her friend one afternoon, in her perfectly upright English, with bright eyes and a big loving smile on her face.

Uh-oh.

Her friend replies slowly, without ire, in a rendition of what they call “the Vincy talk,” ie, the way people talk in St. Vincent, where they are from.

“And you too skinny,” she says, rolling her eyes.

I love meeting people from all over the world and learning what they eat and how they interact and what they care about. And one thing I have recently learned from a very small sample is that talking about appearance is not taboo in the Caribbean in the way that it is here.

I had my first taste of this when I was 8 months pregnant, and was poised to make the trip down the front stoop. Since I couldn’t see my feet, I was attempting to activate some muscle memory and grabbing for the railing when I noticed a neighbor who owned the house two down was about to pass. He stopped in his tracks and looked me up and down.

“My dear,” he said that day — he’s from Jamaica originally, and always calls me my dear. “My dear. You have become very fat in a very short period of time. You must have been eating the pork chops. The turkeys. The roast beefs.”

I’m not saying that the man didn’t have a point, but I did feel compelled to make sure he knew that I was 8 months pregnant.

When I told him, he shrugged and cheerfully walked off.

A few months later he redeemed himself when he passed me on the street pushing my newborn in a stroller, and he said “Well well well, now that fat’s all riding next to you in the carriage.”

Most of it, I wanted to say. Most of it.

*********************

Henry also has another babysitter. She’s from Grenada, and she is more of a regular-shaped individual. Ie, if you had never seen her eat in front of you, you wouldn’t be stuck wondering if she had simply never taken it up as a hobby. She moved to the States comparatively recently, and when she talks, there is no doubt about her being from the islands.

A few weeks ago, we had this conversation:

Celia: I just met some twins you know, out in the park with Henry.

Me: Oh, which twins?

Celia: I don’t know their names.

Me: Who were they with? A sitter or their mom?

Celia: They mom.

Me: What’s she look like?

Celia: They mom? She taller than you.

Me: Hmm.

Celia: She thinner than you.

Me: . . . .

I was surprised, though she was just describing the mom of the mystery twins in comparison to me. It was an expedient way of doing it, I suppose. And it wasn’t designed to be insulting: it was simply direct in a way that I’m not used to.

After all, if she had chosen something like “She had stripes on her shirt,” that wouldn’t have gotten us anywhere, since the woman presumably has more than one shirt. Unless she had some sort of affectation that made her wear a striped shirt every day and she was the neighborhood twin-haver art-poser freak who only wore stripes. Even if we had one of those, and I don’t think we do, some other people would probably still wear stripes and have twins at the same time.

But that’s not what Celia said: she said taller and thinner, and chances are good that the twins’ mom would remain, in the short-term at least, thinner than me. And unless she had a shocking accident, she was likely to be taller than me for the rest of our lives. So I guess it was effective, though perhaps not effective enough, since I still have no idea who she was talking about.

But maybe the next person Celia would run across and be compelled to describe would be fatter than me! And or shorter! And Celia would tell me about it! I could just wait for that to happen.

Then, a few weeks later, they came back from the other playground.

Celia: I met a brown-skin little girl in the park. She know Henry and her mom know you. She say you met last week.

Me: Was it Deena and Baby Delilah?

Celia: I don’t know their name. And then I meet a red-skin lady, looking like you. She know Henry, too.

Ahem. No one is saying that I am not a red-skin lady. In fact, if someone said that I was not a red-skin lady, they would be a liar! But this also caught me off-guard, somehow.

Me: Um. Ok. What else does she look like?

Celia: She taller than you, she (cut off)

Me: Don’t say it! Stop saying it!

Celia: . . . .

Me: So, what’s her baby look like?

Celia: She taller than Henry.

Me: Hmm.

Celia: She thinner than Henry.

(End scene.)

Sunday evening. Here I am, recently returned from Connecticut, and feeling contemplative, and happy and sad at once.

Beth was hospitalized again on the 5th of July for slight pneumonia, and she was discharged back to the nursing home again on Wednesday. We had a good visit this weekend but I’m at the part of the cycle again where I’m totally perplexed at how she can be so ill and this can be “the new normal.” Like, we are supposed to be used to it. And I want to acknowledge it to her how much it sucks and how unfair it is because it clearly validates her, but it also makes her upset. It is hard to know what to do, even though she is my sister.

At the end of our visit this weekend I was choked up and chasing Henry down the hall and the staff and patients (and a patient pretending to be staff?) were stopping to talk with him and I was trying not to start crying because I didn’t want to drag anyone else down, but all of this led to me forgetting to tell the nursing staff her requests when I left. Great! As if she weren’t alone enough in there, I messed up, and I only remembered that I forgot many hours later when I was already back in Brooklyn. I am having a bad guilty day.

So to counter that, I’m going to tell you about Henry’s new lamp, of all frivolous things. It’s a round thing I got at Ikea that they are constantly sold out of because . . . well, let me tell you about it and then you will know why it sells out.

It doesn’t shed light like a normal lamp, but instead is this sort of ugly gray orb with spots on it. When it’s not working its magic, it’s hard not to wonder why you bought it. But when it’s hung up and on, it casts crescent moons, stars, and a Saturn-looking planet everywhere. And if it is moving, these things spin all over the room, in a swirl of pastel colors. (Provided that you lower the lights first; it is useless for providing normal illumination.)

I finally got one of these things for Henry a few months ago, and we didn’t put it up in his room before we moved. However, Matthew hung it up this weekend when Henry and I were away.

When we lowered the lights and showed Henry this evening, he yelled WHEEEEEEEEEEE and spun around and around and laughed. I no longer doubted the lamp or the $29.99 I’d spent on it because it was amazing: really, he had what I thought was the perfect reaction.

Except for, a few minutes later, he came up with an even better one. We were goofing around in his room right before bed, having some milk and doing the routine, when he got up and toddled over to a purple planet on the wall, one that was just about at head height, he put his hands flat on the wall, and he hugged the image of Saturn. Hugging is when he puts his cheek gently against something. Then he kissed it. Kissing is when he carefully places his open mouth gently on something.

Then he ran over to a green star and hugged that one. Henry, at this state at least, is the huggiest boy I know. It makes up for a lot. (I don’t mean that it makes up for a lot of shortcomings in Henry. I mean that it makes up for a lot of difficult things in my life.) He hugged another star, a yellow one cast on the quilt. Then we turned off the lamp and I put him in his crib. I gave him his monkey blanket and his elephant blanket. He snugged up with those guys, then he went to sleep.

Good night.

This recipe, the third in a series about PILE↑, harks back to Chinese sesame noodles. Which, you know, are traditionally eaten cold. Somehow, I powered through the 99-ness of yesterday, without AC, to boil up some linguini and have this in the fridge for an immediate, early, no fuss dinner. Read more…

The Pile series is supposed to be easy, and yet I am unable to record pile recipes for you at the moment. Aside from my books and kitchen still being boxed up, it is 100 degrees this week. No no sorry: I have an update. It is actually 102.

So instead of posting a recipe for the only thing that anyone feels like eating this week — a pile of fat, sweating grapes (have you noticed that grapes are the only thing that looks great fat and sweating?) — I will get you up to speed on a few other pressing topics.

Paper plates If anyone will be delighted to learn that I have been eating off of paper plates of late, in the 2 days before the move and in the 2 days after it, then it is surely my parents. Apart from being the 2 people on earth most likely to care about pretty much anything related to me, they truly appreciate the ease and convenience of paper plates.

And thus, they foist them upon me.

Whenever I have a baby or move, they try to drive down. Before turning on the GPS and steeling themselves for New York traffic, they fill the trunk of the Camry with their own towels, their own pillows, and a stash of paper plates. While I am happy about the arrival of the parents, and their desire to keep me from doing laundry, the arrival of the plates drives me around the bend, because to my mind, the only thing worse than throwing your plates away after you have used them is throwing your plates away before you have used them.

Paper plates make me feel like I have given up. And since I cannot bring myself to use them, either during their visit or afterward, I must store them in a cabinet. There, they fester in a tall pile until the next batch arrives, and the new pile makes what was the old pile look shrimpy.

However, just before and just after the move, I had not only given up on aesthetics and on the environment, I had also given up on cooking and cleaning. We just ordered in and ate off of the plates. Consequently, I have now squandered a very small percentage of the plates — which does not mean that I need them replenished. But see, I had indeed waved a white flag. This surrender will not impress my parents as much as my next announcement.

Drum roll, please:

For the first time since I have lived on my own, I am now roommates with a microwave.

“There’s a perfectly good one in the basement, Mere, that we’ve been saving for you should you ever want it,” is the chorus of a song that became popular in the late ’80s in certain parts of Connecticut.

And it has proven to be an evergreen hit.

However, I’ve never needed one, and I never have so much counter space that I’d prefer to dedicate it to a microwave rather than to something else. I understand the convenience of not using the stove, but I cannot escape from my belief that we (take that as the royal we if you have your own dearly held beliefs) shouldn’t stray too far from traditional cooking methods — convection, conduction, and radiation. Yes, microwaves rely on radiation but it is more the sort that makes one want to steal a leaden vestment from the dentist just in case, rather than the friendly, analog radiation of the broiler or the toaster.

And I suppose I prefer cooking tools where, if you accidentally slipped your pet in there for a moment, all wouldn’t necessarily be lost.

Yes, I am aware that you can cook corn really fast in a microwave. But what if I am fine with my corn taking four minutes instead of three? And what if the more that you want to shave that minute off, the less likely it is that I’ll want to?

But now, a new microwave has entered my life. Like the cheddar I found in the fridge and snuck into dinner last night, it lived here before we did. This microwave is not on the counter, it is somehow built in above the stove and below a cabinet: it is an actual part of the kitchen.

It has a vent in it that exhausts from the stove, and when you put pizza in it and push a button marked “pizza,” it asks how much pizza, and when it is apprised that it is enough pizza for a whole little family, it turns itself on for 5 minutes, which must surely be too long. In other words, it is a microwave that thinks it knows better than me. Imagine that!

The pizza incident reminds me of my husband’s recent birthday, when my father took Matthew aside and informed him privately that they’d like to buy him a microwave. For the sake of convenience, he explained. Though they know that I don’t want one, he continued, which is why they were asking him privately.

What is even less convenient than a cold cup of coffee is being embroiled (radiation) between your wife and her parents over a heated consumer electronics debate.

We did not get a microwave at that point.

But now, we have a microwave. I know that it is not good for heating pizza, but it was 100 yesterday. The main thing that I know that it is good for heating tortillas. So now there are even fewer obstructions to making tacos. That is simply frightening . . . .