don't eat alone

The assignment was simple: meet at the catering shop to pick up the food and then go to the site to cook dinner for eight people:

Appetizers:
curried crab cakes with cucumber yogurt dipping sauce
endive leaves with roasted beets and bleu cheese

Salad of pea shoots and mixed greens with dill, chives, and mint with a sherry vinaigrette

Pecan crusted loin of lamb
Potato and artichoke gratin
Asparagus, roasted peppers, and pearl onions

Strawberry shortcake with vanilla ice cream and strawberry sauce

The way things are supposed to work is the folks at the shop prepare as much as they can ahead of time and then pack up the stuff I will need to do on site. What I assumed that meant was the potatoes would be done and simply need to be reheated and the lamb would be about halfway done and need to be finished.

I was wrong on both counts. The problem was I didn’t do enough checking beforehand and was, therefore, also late getting the meal out because things weren’t ready when I thought they would be. On a night when the task was easy and I should have done well, I turned in an average performance. We got the meal served and I think those who ate it were OK with things, but I felt like my performance was substandard. I did less than my best. Whatever the shop might have done differently, I didn’t do my job well tonight. And I don’t do well when I feel like I haven’t done my best.

It derailed me. I could feel it happening. I apologized to the staff that had to serve the meal. I could hear myself continue to say, “I’m sorry I didn’t do well tonight.” I know part of that was longing for someone to say, “It’s not the end of the world.” No one did. I could feel the grace leaking out of the room, being replaced by the suffocating sense of my unworthiness, which is all too familiar. Can it be that my self-worth swings on whether or not the potatoes are cooked?

Short answer: yes.

I’m a good cook. I’m a passionate cook. I’m intentional when I’m in the kitchen and I work hard. Tonight, I didn’t do well. I missed some things I should have caught and put out food that was less than what I want to present and all of a sudden I feel as though I’m only judged by that damn lamb and those crunchy potatoes. I felt devastated, defeated, depressed.

As I drove back to the shop to drop off the dirty dishes and leftovers, I began trying to talk myself back into sanity. Wynne and Glen were at the shop. Wynne is the pasty chef at the restaurant and someone I’ve gotten to know a little; Glen is the guy who smokes all our meets and makes the sausage and is someone I’m just getting to know. They asked how the evening went and I told them. They both did a great job of listening and helping me find a sense of myself again. I made some movement, but the real progress was made on the walk I took with Ginger and Ella once I got back to the house. Ginger listened well and asked great questions and, as we turned from Broad Street on to Knox, I could feel my feelings beginning to shift. Part of what helped was being able to articulate what I learned tonight that will help me not make the same mistakes again. The other part was simply getting enough distance from the event to realize the dinner may not have been the best, but it wasn’t the end of the world. It was then I remembered one of the staff had responded when I had apologized for my cooking tonight. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll get another chance.”

She’s right. I cook again Friday night and twice on Saturday – and that’s just this week. I don’t get tonight’s lamb and potatoes back, but I can also let them go. (And I wrote those sentences as if the present realizations that are easy for me to incarnate.) A half a century into my life and I remain encumbered by a sense of self-worth that is inextricably tied to my feeling useful. For Descartes, it may have all been in the thinking, but for me, “I do, therefore I matter.” I desperately want to trust that I matter, by the grace of God, because I’m breathing. I certainly believe that’s true for everyone else. Yet, one botched meal and I feel like a failure, two or three days without posting and I think people will quit reading.

I grew up being taught that we are all headed for judgment before God. The image that has stayed in my mind is standing next to God while we watch a movie of my life and the whole time God is groaning and taking notes making me question whether or not I would get out of that room and get to heaven, whether I would measure up or be enough.

Judgment has become far less significant in my understanding of God over the years, though the scene above still has its hooks in me. When I’ve tried to picture it differently, I’ve often moved to a scene where God says, “Good job,” or something similar, but that doesn’t really make it any less about being enough or measuring up. In my breakthrough moments, I picture Jesus meeting me and, opening his arms, simply saying, “Welcome, Milton.” No measures, no tallies, just welcome. As if I belonged.

I want to believe the last scenario. Lord, help my unbelief.

Peace,
Milton

Eighteen April 21sts ago, Ginger and I were married in the First Baptist Church of Irondale, Alabama, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses and a wedding party whose picture rivals the cover photograph of The King Family Christmas.

We got engaged on August 12, 1989 at the Hard Rock Café in Dallas (when there was a Hard Rock Café in Dallas). Every August and April since, we’ve been in a Hard Rock together, which has been relatively easy because we lived in a city with a Hard Rock. A quick search this week let us know the closest café was in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, a mere three and a half hours away.

After opening the Dunkin’ Donuts this morning and dropping Ella off to be spayed, we got in Ginger’s Wrangler and headed east and making a couple of stops along the way, arriving at the pyramid shaped restaurant about 4 o’clock.

We ate what I guess we could call dinner, took a couple of fun pictures,

drove down to the beach for a bit, and then drove home.

And a good time was had by all.

Several years ago now, I wrote a song lyric with Ginger in mind (that I have referenced before). The chorus says:

and this is the story of two common hearts
that started out young and grew old
they have practiced a lifetime the waltz of a well-worn love

I’m not ready to be counted as old just yet, but I will say I know more of love than I did eighteen years ago, thanks to Ginger.

And I plan to keep on dancing.

Peace,
Milton

Today is a significant day in the Brasher-Cunningham household, since it’s the day we invented the Brasher- Cunningham household eighteen years ago (more about that later).

The importance of the day is enhanced because Dunkin’ Donuts opened its doors this morning at 5 a.m. — and we were the very first customers. I’ve got the cup to prove it.

Perhaps we should now say we live in DDurham.

Peace,
Milton

april gave us springtime and the promise
of the flowers and the feeling that we both
shared and the love that we called ours but
I can’t help but have my suspicions ‘cause
I ain’t quite as dumb as I seem; tell me how
can you stand there with a broken heart
ashamed of playing the fool but isn’t that
the way they say it goes just forget all that
and give me the number if you can find it so
I can call and tell them I’m fine and show I’ve
overcome the blow; doctor my eyes have seen
the years and the slow parade of tears without
crying now I want to understand; no, I can’t forget
the feeling or your face as you were leaving but I
guess that’s just the way the story goes, baby
come back any kind of fool could see I was
wrong and I just can’t live without you.

Peace,
Milton

I’ve heard tell of those who rolled cigars
in Havana and how they would choose one
to read each day, the others making up his
share of the quota so they could hear stories
that took them beyond the little rooms where
they rolled leaves for the pleasure of others.

I live in a town built on the stories of those
same leaves. Tonight, in one of the rooms
where they stacked and sold tobacco, I cooked
dinner for those who had stories of their own
to share with one another. And I brought
leaves of my own—basil, fresh and verdant.

I gently pinched to stem off each leaf, and,
as I was taught by those who told me kitchen
stories, I stacked the leaves and rolled them,
much like the Cubans, I suppose, and then
sliced across my herb cigar, letting the leaves
fall in tender strips as the blade rocked

back and forth, releasing the fresh smell of
sunshine and friendship. Even on the drive
home, my hands carried the aroma, the
smell almost indelibly infused into the
crevasses of my fingerprints. I breathed
the story in once more, and then exhaled.

Peace,
Milton

I like to know what’s next as much
as possible, so when they call and say,
“We need you to work a dinner Saturday,”
I wish they would tell me the occasion
and the menu, just so I have an idea of
how to prepare myself to prepare the meal.
I think differently for salmon than sirloin.

Catering, for the most part, means cooking
blind: going to the gig to finish what those
in the prep kitchen have begun, following
their list, counting on them to have done
their jobs, relinquishing any wish for control
or simply being informed. I don’t know
what’s for dinner until I start cooking it.

In the restaurant, the menu means I know
what I’m cooking, but not for whom, leaving
me with an equal measure of uncertainty.
Fair warning is not an ingredient in most of
life’s recipes. Still, I know my hands and my
heart, I know how to get ready and remember
the key is not ingredients, but intention.

Peace,
Milton

One could wish for a day that was carbonated,
words rising effervescently, even effortlessly
to the top, bubbles of hope bursting on the
surface. Today is not that day; nor yesterday.
I’m waiting for the plumber to come find the
block on our main drain, somewhere between
here and the street, underneath the growing
grass and the nascent hasta, underground
where the words are trapped in the sludge,
unable to bore their way to the surface, or to
flow through to the drain under the street.

One would think, in these days so full of
friends and family and meaning, the real
struggle would be to keep the words from
coming; how could I keep from writing?
My life goes on, breakless and brakeless,
trading exhaustion for expression, even as
my heart fills up and overflows. My body
stops and my mind races on; my brain
finally tires and I toss and turn. Be still,
I say, but I can’t. Instead, I pace the house
looking for words, waiting for the plumber.

Peace,
Milton

if it’s going to be fresh
then it must be done
everyday: today and
tomorrow and the day
after that. most of what
we think of as life and
cooking is preparation,
or at least that’s what
we call it. in fact, the
chopping and peeling,
the slicing, marinating –
all of those things we
think of as “the getting
ready” are really the
show: one long act of
love and labor that
puts the plate on the
table or makes room
for the moment when
we get to say, “I love you”
to one another — fresh
everyday.

Peace,
Milton

I turn down our tree-lined streets,
the empty branches reaching skyward
yearning skeletons just now beginning
to show signs of new life, the groans of
creation tuning up like an orchestra
preparing to play a new symphony.

Yet, the trees have not been silent all winter.
Their shadow song is harder, but a melody
nonetheless. The strains of pain and silence
are not easy playing or listening, yet an essential
movement to inform the resurgent joy that
comes with recreation, reawakening, rebirth —

and I am Nicodemus, wondering how we, as
collective Creation can carry all our weight
and worry back into God’s womb and come
forth singing a new song. Biology breaks down
in ways melody does not. We aren’t going
back, but forward, from womb to womb,

birth to birth, song to song, from God to God,
moving symphonically from stark to lush,
from solo to emsemble, from pianissimo to
forte and back again. Newborn babies cry –
as do widows and orphans, the homeless and
the hopeful: tears are our shared melody.

Peace,
Milton

Brilliance with numbers is a curious thing. Paul Erdos, a Hungarian who died in 1996, used to travel the world and stop briefly at the offices and homes of fellow mathematicians. “My brain is open,” he would announce as, with uncanny intuition, he suggested a problem that, without realizing it, his host was already halfway to solving. Together they would find the solution. (“Let’s Talk About Figures” The Economist, March 22, 2008)

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24: 30-32)

algebra

I got lost when the numbers changed
to letters and Mrs. Gibbs refused to give
me directions: “I don’t answer stupid
questions,” she said, and closed my brain.
I can still hear her shouting down
my attempt to understand algebra,
or seeing it as a way of understanding.

I was on the other side of the desk
when a student said of Shakespeare,
“This is like algebra,” without closing
her brain or her heart. She was right
and I was already on the way to seeing
that “to be or not to be?” was not
a stupid question, nor a solitary one.

Jesus walked the Emmaus Road and
asked, “What are you discussing?”
and they began explaining the algebra
of resurrection, even though most
of the equation was still unsolved.
Jesus broke the bread in two and
their hearts open and on fire.

Conventional wisdom would assume
a poem should be a bit more algebraic
than this one, I suppose. It reduces
rather quickly to wonder what we
might find when we see questions
as serendipitous rather than stupid
and answer, “My heart is open.”

Peace,
Milton