Miriam Feder

I studied which sweater you’d like,
what’s for breakfast, when to ask and not.
Important lessons never right enough.
I was eliminated from the next round.

You’re filled too, if you paid attention.
Note: Ritter chocolate, Asiatic lilies.
Should we discard streaky windows
or recycle them for a new heart?

I studied which sweater you’d like,
what’s for breakfast, when to ask and not.

Pity the next ones stirring rubble.
I’m tired and despairing of a whole-heart love.
Who would sort my scabs and scars?
Could I open bones filled with secrets?

All that energy scibbered away.
It sprung me: toss it in or let it out?
Maybe I could have spent it better
making something to hold onto…a nice pot.

I studied which sweater you’d like,
what’s for breakfast, when to ask and not.

Opportunity—what about those misses.
Don’t say “each love is a classroom …
You’ll get there when you’re ready.”
Whatever could that look like?

Love—soured, spat out and washed away,
beats safety, footing and progress.
Messy windows, crusty scabs, fossil-habits
stumble broken hearts along.

I studied which sweater you’d like.

In my early travels I saw people cook smelly things in woks on the street. I would ask “what is it?” “again…please,” a third time… Now I was embarrassed and I still didn’t have a clue what he said. My rule became: if it’s very hot; buy it; bite it; and if you don’t like it—toss it. If it’s good who care what it was? Eat more.

I had endeared myself to my father by being willing to eat anything–pickled herring at one month. Either I didn’t mind smelly things and weird textures, or I had a sunny disposition and strong desire to please. Of course I was delighted when my father shook with a belly laugh.

A picky eater wouldn’t have stood a chance in my house. The worst scorn and judgment would have been flung her way. I carefully carved out the two things I really didn’t want to eat that I thought I could get away with–mushrooms and asparagus. I ate everything else I ran into–even scary calamari tentacles. Surprise! my Mother suspended her own quick judgment and helped me out on the mushrooms—“she’s probably allergic to them anyway.” My Father never accepted these small phobias and made each restatement a small terror. “What— you don’t eat mushrooms?”

Girlfriends who asked my Mother what was for lunch or dinner received powerful disapproval. Linda was known for only eating Juniorette noodles. In anticipation of her lunch visit, my Mother, a non-driver, knocked the tail light off the ’59 Imperial. Look at this old boat on-line if you what to see what a disaster this must have been. Those expensive noodles were the punch-line of many a commentary. Juniorettes referred to Linda’s entire family. She was not invited again.

Food was love. And it occurred by my Mother’s rules, tastes and family history. When I came home from college, grad school, life—anything I might once have liked would be trotted out at every opportunity. I realized my home was one continuous meal.

Mostly I came home to blitzes: generous pillows of slightly sweetened ricotta cheese wrapped skillfully in buttery-fried crepes, topped with sour cream and cinnamon sugar. My Mother hasn’t been able to make a blintz for years. But if food is love, blintzes are an orgy—one that paradoxically demands monogamy. Eating frozen blintzes would be a very tacky affaire.

Many of my friends “discovered” real food in their 20s and 30s. I’ve shunned their studied, foody-ness and recipe servitude. I know that baby boomers—despite their uber-remodeled kitchens and gourmet devotionals— were usually raised on canned vegetables. Well-off families ate frozen, but for some reason fresh eluded most tables in this fertile country of truck farms. Fresh and crisp–rarer still. My college roomies were terrified of the pans full of Velveeta free stir-fried veggies I cooked from produce grown not ten miles away.

Eating is a sensual, earthy experience that supports life. Not an effete substitute for interaction, nor an excuse for obsession. Like most things, when it gets precious it becomes a pain in the ass.

Not that there isn’t something to be learned from a recipe. My scorn is part defense—I’ll admit. I can’t really stick to a recipe. I always have a creative addition, a lazy substitution. Most of my cooking is from the hip. It surprises me how much I absorbed from not paying attention to Mom. Marinate…. Marinate… Repetition would often help these little experiments develop into jewels, but it seems too….repetitive. Make it again? But….this time lets try…

It’s hard to truly incorporate foods and pots I didn’t grow up with. I understand Mom’s defaults. I have tackled eggplants. They seduce me in the grocery store, with their luscious purple gowns, but I know they never wandered into my grandmother’s kitchen. Yes I do Tofu. But unstudied, it drifts away from my thoughts. In the last two years I’ve added tempeh. It’s a good vehicle for sauces.

It’s a precious time, these days. But a table full of food is still the easiest way to show love, generosity and welcome.

What is Chanukah all about? Chanukah, my children, Chanukah is the festival of socks. Each year the great Bubbe comes to the foot of each child’s bed and takes a sniff.

“Och, gotenyu. What a smell. I can tell you need new socks, you little stinker.”

And so, all over the world, at Chanukah, children get socks to replace the old worn out and stinky ones from last Chanukah. So now you know! Now we understand our non-Jewish neighbors, who always like to borrow our traditions and adjust them just a bit, come to hang their stockings by the hearth. Their Great Bubbe goes in drag and has a yen for fireplaces. Do we have fireplaces? No. Who would chop the wood? Who would make the fire? But it’s good for the Goyim. So socks connect us all with a sense of the warmth of the season.

Chocolate, my children, we celebrate Chanukah to appreciate how good the world is when there are eight days in a row of chocolate at our table. We have chocolates to share, to give and most importantly to eat. We even have chocolate to drink-noch. We make chocolate into money and gamble for it with our dreidels. If we are very lucky we get many Gimmels. Gimmels are for great—a great miracle happened here. Of course I’m right—I just won all the chocolate. Ante up so I can spin again before my dreidel cools off.

And why is chocolate so important? It’s the most delicious thing of all. It is rich and warm. It can be wrapped in beautiful paper and please the eye, even the eye of a grumpy Shin spinner. It gives you energy. It’s energy and hope that make you spin again and again and eventually you might get at least a Hay and split the pot. Chocolate makes you sweet on the inside, which makes you sweet on the outside which makes the world sweet.

Nuts kinder, nuts. This is what we want on Chanukah. The earth has given us nuts of the season and we use these to play and play with our dreidel. Nuts of all kinds, with their pretty little wooden homes. Round mahogany homes for filberts, thin crowded pecan shells crammed with sweetness. Stout comfortable walnut shells so that walnuts may play Chanukah games before they serve as Charoseth next Pesach and even dark crinkly homes for Brazil nuts, full of oil, like our beloved lamp.

Oh but you must think I am silly to forget the star of the whole show, quietly waiting in the dark for me to notice—our humble and most-dear Chanukah friend—the potato. The potato gives it’s all for Chanukah, allowing it’s pale flesh to be shredded, and stirred with eggs and onion and ladled into hot grease, flipped on it’s back, splashed with sour cream or applesauce (ok, you can have both) chewed and swallowed and maybe even some day soon, digested. This gentle giant promises all year long, reminding us how much we love Chanukah for the excuse to make latkes, for the better excuse to eat latkes, and for all the oil we can consume with each latke. And this, this little potato, really this is the secret of Chanukah. How the perfectly ordinary, so common among us, shines with greatness in the lights of hope, happiness, family, food and song.

What? You say Chanukah is not the potato, not the nuts, not the chocolate, not the warm snuggly socks? You’ve got to be kidding. Not even the beautiful menorah all bright with her warm candles? Songs—are you sad because I forgot the wonderful Chanukah songs where everyone knows the first two lines and hums the rest slightly out of tune? Is that what you think?

Oh, no. You think it’s us? Me, and the children, and our friends, and the guy I work with, and my neighbor, all gathered around the menorah while I look for the matches, turn down the soup that’s boiling over, flip the latkes one last time and finally make the brocha. You think that’s what Chanukah’s all about? Well, maybe you’re right.

 

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Thanks for a big brown bird, soft and crunchy stuffing, sweet yams, a tart cranberry relish and ample bottles of wine. Thanks for a fresh green salad and don’t mind if I skip the smashed potatoes, rolls and that baked broccoli-cheese traditional. Who would notice?

Thanks for bringing this group together year upon year, through marriages, visiting parents, babies, toddlers, widowed mothers, t’weens, divorces, rearrangements, and— for some time now— only one Grandma left. Maybe sometime we’ll be the grandmas. Will that add to or take away? Yes, well, don’t anyone hold their breath.Thanks for all the spills, the misses, and fine nights of charades.

This is what my Thanksgivings have looked like for most of thirty years. A tight and cozy table at a friend’s house with once-a-year linen and platters upon platters. It must have been a whole year between each one of these food-a-thons, but I’m surprised they add up so high.

Thanks for good fortune in our own lives. We’re fortunate that our sadnesses have been transitory: real but not chronic. Long suffering has stayed distant from this table. Death has come only for the older ones.  We’ve come to know that’s not always the case and so we’ve grown so very grateful.

Our children…they already grew up so fast. Now that we see the rate of spin, we know their lives will fly right by at an increasing rate. We know that the next ten years might have some harsh surprises for them—for us. No rush, no rush—but no slowing it down.

Take a few moments before dessert. Take a basket, choose teams and try to recollect the movies ofthe year, the book titles nobody read and the songs that separate the generations.  Let me hold onto this enormous good and gather in all the smells and tastes, the warmth and the story, the hopes, the disappointments and the familiar smiles. Let me taste them like another course, no matter how full I am. Four and twenty lifetimes baked in a pie. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.

 

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Alone is a common way to be when you’re an only child. So common I stopped noticing that other people were usually in groups. So common I didn’t bother to learn how to share myself with others. Physical needs, those could be dispatched in hot-blooded bedrooms and backseats. Social needs were fulfilled in parties and communal living. But day to day walking and working through life nobody seemed to notice me—even me.

I wouldn’t call myself a loner. I’ve always had gatherings on my calendar, different pockets of people, new friends to make, old friends to catch up on. But I’m just fine alone—even in a movie theater—that most forbidding of lone adventures.

I’ve walked the streets of small towns, big cities, beaches, exotic continents, parks and neighborhoods, all alone. I’ve made most decisions big and small alone. I’ve trod the hardest trails alone: a father’s death; a mother’s deterioration; divorce; a child’s debilitating illness; job loss; career dissatisfaction. I barely knew to call on anyone. I kept partners and friends at the periphery. There has always been an invisible barrier that I unknowingly establish. Some came closer and then spun out. Some couldn’t stand the demands, the not-knowing, the shifting priorities these trials set up for me. Some would have been there for me had I let them. And some did get through to me and took a bit of the strain from my tired bones.

I lived well-loved with my parents for eighteen years. I spent thirty years as part of one couple or another. People might not have noticed how alone I was. Coupling can be so isolating. At its worst, it steals the generous mantle of solitude and replaces it with missed opportunity. And it looks to all the world like you have a partner. In those unconnected hours face to face with my partner, drenched in the ice-water of failed intimacy alone became loneliness.

When embrace is worm-eaten, when the arms belongs to the preoccupied or self-important, when he can see only his own reflection in the pool, when the hand gropes for the brittle or the habitual, it warps the strong dependable muscles of the body’s right side. The crust around that right shoulder, thigh and calf, becomes slightly soggy—rancid in the promising chords of camaraderie. Then, if some of the weight—the unearthly weight of sadness, the gonging weight of concern, the black weight of doubt, the sharp stones of anxiety—shifts, the softened side collapses, endangering both of us, sprained and sprawling atop the original hardship. So dissolution accompanies a child’s illness. So death warps life. But alone, standing on two strong legs… Well, the feet may wear, the shoulders ache, the breath rasp, but the slow stride uphill can continue, almost indefinitely.

Alone may not have learned how to ask, or how to share the burden, the questions or the uncertainty. Alone is used to marshaling, not unburdening. She dares not risk collapse too often. And too, alone is the child of alone. Generations have not asked, have not confided, have marshaled.

Alone has its own problems, to be sure. But self-reliance isn’t among them. Alone comes through—sometimes without asking all the right questions, sometimes based on incorrect assumptions, sometimes not as good as it could have been, but the tasks get done, the feet are re-bandaged, the shopworn heart is revived with bygone balms and blossoming boughs. Alone.

 

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Ah, once again it’s here–National Ice Cream Month.  Yes, really.  Even in Portland it’s been hot beyond belief and so an homage to one of the truly divine foods. Here are some ice-cream recollections. In Print

You can hear more about my adventures with fresh peach ice cream.   In the meantime, stay cool!

 

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My first Bogie period began in 1973, at Berkeley.  It didn’t seem  weird  at the time, running around in Birkenstock’s and being crazy about that well-suited guy. I went through a lot of the oeuvre again at the beginning of the century (my, doesn’t that ooze with scope.) It’s amazing how different the cigarette smoke looks to us, isn’t it?  But otherwise…there’s still a beguiling rhythm and charm. In Print

 

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Time to laugh a little bit.  And goodness knows,  computer dating requires a sense of humor.  Doesn’t everything?

 

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In Print

In Print