Buss Up Shut
This great thing happened yesterday. All of the people in our building were invited down to the super’s workshop to a holiday party thrown by the super and his wife and the work crew that runs our small co-op.
Henry and I, with our dreams (my dreams) of an early bedtime, would arrive first, long before Daddy came home from work. “We have to get down to Debbie’s party,” we kept informing one another, during the pas de deux of me trying to get him shod and clothed and then him wondering just why Mommy isn’t ready.
Debbie is our friend and Henry’s babysitter. She is married to the superintendant, who we also hire sometimes as a handyman, plus they live in the apartment next door to us and are always on the premises. Consequently, they are the fixedest of possible fixtures in our apartment-dweller lives. Henry, who associates all parties with singing and cake, did not want to miss a moment.
To properly celebrate, Henry wanted to be sure that he had ALL of his cowboy gear either on him or with him, so he had the boots, the hat, and the guitar he got for Christmas, and I was compelled to carry his hobby horse. A cowboy needs a horse and a guitar, he explained. Not to mention a mommy to help carry his accoutrements.
The workshop is across from the washing machines in the basement so I’ve seen in but never seen the part where the party was — a big cement block room with workbenches normally full of work but cleared for the occasion. The periphery was lined with chairs and some big tables set out for food, and there was Soca (Trinidadian Calypso) dominating the soundscape, and cascading twinkle lights strung everywhere. They had warmed up what must normally be a pretty cold room.
The food was all stuff that Debbie had cooked, and it came down in huge foil containers that were slotted into stands with sterno containers under them.
I love our co-op. It’s a blend of different skin tones and different professions — nurses, court reporters, journalists, teachers, editors, writers, retirees, and accountants. No one seems destitute, nor does anyone appear to be living the Nobu-going lifestyle of the idle (or working) rich.
Last night, lots of us were gathered around in the twinkle lights scooping up our gracious friend and neighbor’s Spanish rice, braised oxtail, neckbone curry, potato curry, tamarind sauce, and torn up hunks of roti, the delicious, layered buttery bread known in Indian food as paratha. “Buss up shut,” Debbie called the pan of roti.
It often takes Debbie and I a few tries to really get what one other is saying, but I searched on “Bust up roti” when I got home and realized that it’s called Buss Up Shut, and it’s a specialty from Trinidad, where those guys are from. It looks like a torn shirt, hence the “bust up shirt,” hence the “buss up shut.”
The one thing I didn’t get to try that I wanted to was the Hennessy with cranberry they were making.
The inside baby and I scarfed and enjoyed two plates of food. (Uh, one apiece?) One neighbor kept telling Debbie that she was disappointed not to see the mango sauce this year, but personally, I could not get enough of that buss up shut with the tamarind sauce. Henry was shy except for with Debbie and I, and despite his status as a rice aficionado, only wanted to try the cookies: a white kind with chocolate stripes applied to one side and the chocolate bottom, and some pink wafers.
Chatting with the neighbors, I went into a sort of time warp and only realized that two entire hours had passed when I saw Henry yawning and rubbing his eyes. By that time, lots and lots of us were there with huge plates of food in our laps, and drinks in our hands, and Debbie’s son, an ace drummer, was standing up and tapping a screwdriver against a bottle of booze both artfully and thoughtfully. We had to go, though, and came back up in the elevator balancing the horse, and the guitar, and a huge plate of food for Daddy.
Happy this year. And happy new year!
Emotional Manipulation
Today I picked up my son from playschool. I felt guilty because I was late, and it’s not like it was the first time. When am I not late, lately?
I am the teacher liaison, so if the teacher needs to complain about a parent, to whom does she come to to do it? To me. So I feared that I was about to be spoken to, or not spoken to because it would be uncomfortable, and I burst in rather breathless at ten after twelve.
I’d already used the “I needed to find some pants that would fit me before I could leave the house” excuse with her last week, so I went with, “I’m so sorry and I promise that I will make a real effort to be on time in the future.”
The teacher, who can’t start her cleaning and prep for the next class until the last child is picked up, stood Henry up. They’d been reading together while they waited for me, and she handed Henry a holiday card, sealed, in addition to a little art project they’d made, and told him to hand them to Mommy.
It took a few tries to achieve the handoff but finally, I had the handful of paper. I figured I’d open the card later but I glanced at the art project as I took him by the hand and turned to bustle off with him.
What I saw seemed to be of a more framable quality than the cheerful gluey messes we normally bring home. It was a little square of very tasteful green paper, about 3.5 by 3.5 inches, with slightly smaller white square of paper glued in the center, and in the middle of that, a dark red painted handprint , anchored by a dark red glued on paper heart in one of the corners. Ok, another handprint, I thought. We see a lot of those.
But then, in cursive writing — clearly not Henry’s — it said “This is the hand you used to hold when I was three years old.”
And then I made an unplanned, unholy noise, a wail of happiness and sadness coming up in my throat. I lost control. Crying, snorting, tears, immediate blurred vision. “Whoops, those are some pregnancy hormones,” someone commented. The teacher explained that she did not mean to make me cry. Well, no. But it was nearly impossible to get ahold of myself. I quickly told Henry that I wasn’t sad, but that I just loved him a lot.
Despite the factual error — Henry is not three yet, but competitive New Yorker that I am, I stuck him in with a group of 3 year olds — it struck a loud and lovely but also overwhelming chord. It was like a church chord on Christmas in a place with very high ceilings, where you feel like you’re going to be blown away by the divinity of it all, the beauty and weight and emotion of the music and all of the love and care and belief that is behind it, even if you’re not a religious sort.
I am so savoring this moment in time with Henry, our last moments alone before life changes forever, again.
What if he isn’t always almost three and this close to me? Guess what, he won’t be. What if I forget what his squishy little hand feels like this week? It’s not like I remember perfectly what his hand felt like at 18 months, that one sunny afternoon when he was wearing a striped sunsuit and climbing the stairs to our porch and I tried my hardest to never forget even one detail of that moment when he was so beautiful and ripe and perfect, but in a very different way than he is beautiful and ripe and perfect on this Wednesday afternoon almost a year and a half later.
And I feel with great acuity a stab of guilt at my potential for another great love who is coming down the pike. While I want a sibling for Henry, and I want more love in my life, I don’t want to inflict the hurt and displacement every child feels when another child arrives on the scene. I know that it’s all for the good, but now more than ever I want to be able to do something well, to act gracefully in order to protect someone else’s feelings. And now more than ever, I will be distracted by the newbie, and crabby because I’ll be tired. It’s hard. It’s normal. People do it. Whatever.
But the teacher certainly got me.
Looked at another way, I got her, because she can’t quite scold me for being late while I’m sobbing at receiving a preschool project so perfectly planned and executed.
Who is manipulating who, here?
Pepper Grinders
I lost my sister a year ago in November.
The anniversary of Beth’s death was November 5th. I thought I’d write about it then, because I was at least theoretically aware of the difficulties that anniversaries of deaths can bring. But actually, on the anniversary itself, I felt comparatively wonderful. I had emailed with my parents. My mom responded saying that she’d been reflecting on what a miracle we had found in the midst of such a horror, in that so many of our friends and relatives supported us in the best way that they could.
And then she related that she’d been out shopping for a gift for someone, and that she’d seen some holiday things that she actually wanted to buy, though it had been several years since she’d felt like decorating or celebrating. And so she bought these holiday things. “And I just know that Beth would approve,” she’d joked, as a conclusion.
She’s right. Socks with ghosts on them, yard flags with Easter eggs, nonstick quickbread pans in any sort of celebratory shape: no one liked stockpiling holiday crap more than my sister. My mom’s email was warm and it made me feel hopeful, and like other people were hopeful, and that there was stuff to laugh about again.
And then, just a few days later, I was grinding pepper in my kitchen, delicious Costa Rican black peppercorns that our dear friends had just brought back for us, and suddenly the little black balls were rolling all over the kitchen floor. Oh no! My friends gave us those special pepper balls! Conserve them! I figured that the top had come unscrewed and went to tighten it up, but then I realized that the hard plastic resin that the grinder is made of had devolved, and a chunk had fallen out of the bottom.
My pepper grinder.
In my brain, I know that things are not important: people are. But what if I’ve lost the person who gave me the thing, and that my continued relationship with that person is enhanced by the thing? A huge part the way that my sister expressed herself was through the careful selection and distribution of gifts. Do you know how much I loved my pepper grinder? It was the most perfect one, selected and distributed by Beth one Christmas. Suddenly, I felt like the pepper grinder myself, chunks falling away from me.
For the next several days, I kept it turned over, so that the remaining pepper wouldn’t fall out, on the 2 x 2 square feet of counter that is mine to cook on. This is a hotly contested space that I fight tenaciously with my husband over if he dares leave anything on it. Something taking up room on the counter turns me into a fox with sharp angry teeth. So when he asked — Hey, is this broken? Yes. Can I throw it away? Uh, no, not yet.
Finally I got all of the information off of it that I could, and then put it into the trash quickly and with my eyes averted. It was like gulping down a big calcium pill while trying to focus on something else so as not to gag. It was like looking away while getting my blood drawn. It’s ridiculous but it was like saying goodbye to my sister all over again.
Enter Christmas. I love the lead up to Christmas. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, right, snow sparkling off of your nose and shopping and cocoa, but it’s also somehow one of the most fraught and saddest, because anything that requires you to take stock of whether you are as happy as you feel like you are supposed to be also sort of stinks by design.
I’d love to know what Beth really thought of it: I love it only the tiniest fraction as much as she did, and maybe she had difficulty with aspects of it, too. Now, I wonder, why aren’t we shopping for our mom or dad and squabbling over who is going to drive and what will be on the radio and stopping for some crazy hot chocolate or coffee drink? Why aren’t we in her damn minivan with our KIDS, who love each other the way cousins should, and packing them in and packing them out and keeping them up later than they should be up and feeding them too-salty food at Boston Chicken after we shop? If you get to do this with your sister, I am just going to say it: there is a part of me that is furious with you.
The last time I was actually out Christmas shopping with my sister, we were in a bookstore. She was moving very slowly with a walker and could barely speak, and she took forever and ever at the counter, and she demanded that my husband and I also take her to Land’s End, and wow, was she difficult and tenacious and bound and effing determined to get all of the shopping that she could in, in. She knew it was the last time. It’s not like it wasn’t awful; it was really pretty awful. Things are easier, in a way, now that she is gone. And I am moving forward; I really am:
I heard an Olivia Newton John song on the radio this week and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I really did. How can I describe this: when something is from childhood, it’s like a mural of memory, and the presence of my sister in this memory is so huge that she’s like, an integral color. Like blue. There is blue in the memory mural backdrop of the song, but there is also green, and purple, and white, and every part of it seems to contain blue, be it bold or subtle, in one way or another. And this is such a gift, to be blessed with her in everything, but it is also such a struggle. But the other day, Olivia Newton John was not making me cry. I was just happy remembering being little, and at a great enough remove that I could take the blue in the background in stride. I parked and sat there until it ended, stunned that what I felt was unadulterated enjoyment, without the need for cleansing tears.
After her death, people told me that before long, I would remember the healthy Beth instead of the sick one. I think that last week was an example of that happening. There are visions of her I will never forget, and I feel that I should never forget—why should I get to forget these grim situations if she actually had to endure them, and her 8-year-old boy had to see them—but I am also having moments of remembering and appreciating the stubborn, pretty, chronically late, fiercely protective sister as a backdrop to my life instead of the terribly ill, furiously angry, unable-to-support-the-weight-of-her-own-head one. Of course, they are the same person, but to be able to have the first without the second, sometimes, is a big relief.
I have not yet bought one Christmas present, and when I realized that it was the 12th, I began to panic. Today, after a dr’s appointment in Manhattan, I had a half an hour before I needed to leave to pick up my son at preschool and I stopped in at Williams Sonoma. But to shop? Probably not.
Here is my relationship with Williams Sonoma: After I graduated from college and before I moved to Texas, I needed a bunch of cash, so I worked days at a university, and evenings at Williams Sonoma. (They needed extra help for the Christmas season.) Before and after my brief stint there, all of the Phillipses have always had a soft spot for this warm, glowy, well-organized, too-expensive store with its $11 waffle mixes and little jars of lemon curd and Christmas soundtrack and tiny cups of coffee with real half & half. Today when I had an extra bit of time, and I was actually alone, I realized that I was going in there to grieve, or to celebrate, or to do the combo that I so excel at. Linens from Provence, and crockery for $69, and heavy cast iron pans, and memories of an aesthetic admired but never in real life achieved. I got myself a miniature cup of coffee and I noted the waffle mix I would never buy for myself and I would have judged her for buying for me and I went into the corner and cried and I got another tiny cup of coffee and I browsed the pepper grinders.
In this way I had about a half an hour with my sister, and then I left.
Avgolemono, or 31 Weeks
I don’t want to start every blog post with an apology for never blogging. It’s just not easy to accomplish at the moment. Life has slowed to a turtle’s pace. The pace of a large, pregnant sea turtle, seeking a place on the beach to lay her zillions of eggs. Also, the turtle spits. Perhaps, because of the spitting, we switch metaphors to that of a llama on the beach, confused as to why it is on the beach. But make that a slow llama. I don’t want you to be picturing a fast beach llama.
Tuesday was 31 weeks, and it was a rough day in the annals of pregnancy. I had a doctor’s appointment that left me in a tailspin. I love the obstetrician but she told me to be prepared for the possibility of *hospital bedrest* later in the pregnancy, and to take my blood pressure every three or four days. (My current blood pressure is perfect. In fact, “perfect!” is what the medical assistant who took it on Tuesday said. But it’s creeping up from being imperfect—low—and my inability to keep my potassium at normal levels means that my body is not able to regulate it, and so my doctor is already fearing pre-eclampsia, despite a blood pressure reading that, on any other day, would earn me a trip down the medical runway, strutting and swinging my hips with an unfocused look in my eyes.)
Anyhow, hospital bedrest, even the phrase, was a tough idea to get acclimated to. What about plain horrible bedrest? Couldn’t we start there? Maybe we can start there, should we need to start somewhere. And I know that she just wanted me to be aware of things that she might prescribe for me in the future.
And then, she did a fundal height measurement, which is a vague and medieval way of doing obstetrics where they touch your belly to see how high up your uterus is extending, and then measure that with a tape measure, and then compare the number of centimeters from your belly button with the number of weeks pregnant that you are, and decide if the number matches. It reminds me of taking my cat to the vet, my dear baglike cat, and they’d “palpate” (mush) her and say “mmm-hmmm, kidneys good, ok, there’s her liver, liver’s good,” etc. I am more taut than the cat — especially now, for crying out loud, but it’s hard for me to see how the doctor can tell where my uterus ends and my everything else begins.
Anyhow based on the fundal height measurement my baby seemed a bit small to her, at least in contrast to the baby’s formerly gigantic-whilst-in-utero older brother, Henry, who sent the obstetric team off of the deep end for entirely different reasons. We were with another practice then. They had higher tech machines for measurement, and they would tell me how far along he was measuring according to his measurements. And I’d come home quaking because the message was “you have an enormous baby in there; it is measuring two weeks ahead — no, THREE! three weeks ahead!” But, though I was highly concerned about the method of egress, I was also delighted that I was making such a big one, because big equated to healthy in my mind.
My current OB wanted to be reminded of how large Henry was, and then she wanted me to find a time to go to the maternal fetal evaluation unit of the hospital to get the current baby measured, because the baby seemed small.
Now, we live in Brooklyn. It’s quite a trek to get to the Manhattan OB, and with a two year old in two, it’s quite a trek. So I called the hospital and begged for them to see me right then: we were already a block away, we had nothing but a proposed nap on the schedule, one which would be flouted and ignored and screamed at anyhow, and I knew I’d be overly concerned thinking about the baby without the information.
The first person I called at the maternal fetal evaluation unit acted like I was crazy to ask, and then asked if I wanted to propose the idea of them squeezing me in to the supervisor of the unit. I did! I did want to propose that to the supervisor of the unit! I just wanted to see whether it was possible. If it wasn’t, I’d certainly understand, but I decided to ask.
However, the supervisor did not answer her phone, so I had to call back. When I called back I spoke to someone else, who said “They think your baby is measuring small? Come in at 1pm today: we will squeeze you in. Go have some lunch first, and then come straight here.”
I asked if I could bring a two year old: not all medical offices thinks that is ok. “You child is a blessing,” this woman replied. “Of course you can bring him.” Ok, so, lots of blessings. Things were looking good, maybe.
Even better so because my favorite Greek restaurant is across the street from the hostible, as Henry calls it, and I would be FORCED to take him there to pass the time. Still, I felt panicked by the visit, and like I am somehow underperforming as a human making a baby, because all of these things keep being really difficult and confusing. The spitting, the palpitations, the intermittent but still existant vomiting, a possible thyroid problem, and recently, lots of anxiety and irritability. And it’s one thing if I am disappointed at the way I am handling things, but another thing altogether if whatever physical challenges I have are getting in the way of baby being able to grow well in my body.
So on the way there, I called my husband to let him know what was happening. I was trying to get Henry to the Greek restaurant but then I started crying while talking with his dad, and of course I never stop spitting, so I was taking a few tearful steps and then having to spit into the gutter, and when you cry you get sort of mucousy, so rather than a confused sea-llama I may have been looking like an enormous pregnant drug addict, I am sure, hawking sticky spit while responding to sweet perfect Henry holding my hand and looking at me and my tears and saying, hopefully, “Mama, you are happy?”
Matthew indicated, as delicately as possible, that my hormones might be slightly responsible for my mood. I was delighted to hear that, actually, because I’d far rather be reacting to hormones than being truly as broken or crazy or worried as I was feeling. Henry distinguishes between something being “‘tend scary” (pretend scary) and “really scary.” Hormones might mean that my life was ‘tend scary. I’d prefer that. We wrapped up the call and I wiped off my face and entered the Greek restaurant.
One of Henry’s favorite food groups is soup, and one of my favorite soup groups avgolemono, the classic Greek recipe of chicken, lemon, orzo, and egg. More specifically, I love the version that they serve at that restaurant. In fact, I discovered my love for it at that very restaurant when I was pregnant with Henry, and I kept having to stop by the hospital for tours of it, or scans, or to get an amnio, or when I’d need to drop off 24 hours worth of urine in a giant, flagrantly yellow container with a red cap. So I wanted to try the soup for old times sake, but Henry rejects chicken, declaring it “spicy.” He rejects all meat and meat substitutes on these grounds: he doesn’t know the word “disgusting” or “visceral” yet. But I ordered a bowl for us to share, and a side of rice pilaf, and a side of broccoli.
The soup arrived. And I have never heard such moans of pleasure while eating as I did from my little guy. MMMMMMmmmmm, Henry intoned. This is SO YUMMY. This my soup? This is our soup? We can share? You have a big spoon and mine is smaller? MMMMMmmmmmmm. This soup is for ME. We will share it.
It was a delight to see him share one of the great eating pleasures I had during my pregnancy. And now he was out, and loving it, either because he’d had it in utero, or because he himself had ALWAYS loved it on a cellular level, and driven me to eat it again and again during our similarly fraught visits to the Greek restaurant.
Either way, I was moved. And moved again to realize that our baby Rainbow, small or big, still on the inside, was also getting to taste our wonderful family soup. My big Avgolemono, and my little one. My outdoor one, and my indoor one.
I am reading a book about being pregnant with the second child — Waiting for Birdy by Catherine Newman — and one of the salient themes is that the writer is so blessed with her first child and her absurd love for him that she is terrified that her luck — the luck of health, among other things — will run out with her second one. The reason that the book is good is because she can tap into and describe the see-saw of joys and fears that parenting provides. It’s like gambling with a lot of chips on the table. It’s why I never had much interest in trying interesting forms of drugs: things are reasonably good, why mess with them? Even if they might be really fun?
At 1pm, we trudged across the street to the hospital.
The baby measured 55% on the scan.
“All of our children are above average,” my husband joked, when I called him from the lobby of the hospital. Henry climbed all over the green-patterned chairs while we talked, looking at the pigeons who had somehow gotten into the high-ceilinged atrium. Henry, who was either inside my belly during our previous visits to this lobby, while we wondered and worried about his health, or newly outside and being arranged with great love and care into his carseat for his trip home, on these very seats. Like it or not — and I guess I like it, and I guess I don’t — these are incredibly emotional times.
An old friend pointed out during a spate of hormonal or potassium or stress induced weepiness (that would be mine, not hers) that looked at another way, I have ideal blood pressure and a wholly normal seeming baby. And that the story could have been related that way, instead of my exhausted and terrified interpretation.
Yeah. Wow. Right.
I Just Made Cranberry Sauce, and the ROI Was HUGE
ROI, for those not as acutely in tune with the business world as I am, means return on investment.
This afternoon I invested 15 minutes and a pint of cranberries and a few other things I had around the house and I made a batch of what seems to me to be the best cranberry sauce ever.
I now plan to spend most of my forties, which will begin tomorrow, making cranberry sauce.
(To be truthful: since I started this post I also fixed our toilet, just like that, and so now I plan to spend my 40’s making cranberry sauce and plumbing. It’s good to always be learning new skills.)
We are not hosting Thanksgiving this year, as we had initially planned to do. But today I was shopping for a chicken to roast for a cozy Sunday night dinner, the last of my 30’s, and all of these cranberries kept catching my eye, in display after display after display. So I grabbed a pint and brought them home.
My only cranberry sauce-making experience was with my parents a long time ago, when they made a cranberry onion relish, which I now realize was something like a chutney, but at the time it really made me want to die. Cranberries? Onions? Together? Absolute sacrilege. It may have been an elegant nod to another culture, if what you were in possession of was an open-minded adult palate, but that is not what I had. I remember a very foreign combination of bitter — cranberry — and pungency — onions that had been cooked less than most onions I’d ever encountered. I recall pink bleeding into the cells of the onion, staining it in what I considered to be a criminal manner. I remember wishing we didn’t have to eat it.
Cranberry sauce and I have always been friends, but it’s been the canned sort: sometimes even the jelled sort with the rings still present. Still, at this stage I’m happy to toss together a chutney out of things we have on hand, so I figured that I could probably make a cranberry sauce out of things I had on hand.
I searched around for various recipes and came up with something I thought would work, though I didn’t have orange juice, and that was the main binding ingredient aside from cranberries.
At home later today, I rinsed the cranberries and put them into a saucepan. I added some white sugar — about 2.5T — and some brown sugar, about a third of a cup. I cut open an orange and grated in a little zest, and then squeezed in the juice. I added the juice from half of a lemon. I poured in an ounce of golden rum, set the heat to medium high, and over the course of 15 minutes I listened to the pop pop pop of taut lovely skins as the separate ingredients first turned themselves into a mixture, and then turned itself into candy.
I highly recommend trying. This is a link to the delicious recipe that inspired it, from a site called Savory Sweet Life, with slightly larger quantities. (It would be better to make more for entertaining purposes later in the week; we nearly finished this.)
Church Avenue Chomp 