don't eat alone

The afternoon that they moved my mother into hospice her doctor came to check on her. Although we all knew she would never leave the hospital, her death was not imminent. She looked at the doctor and said, “If my goal is heaven, what do I have to do?”

He smiled and said, “Stop eating and drinking.” And then he said, “I want you to know you have made a decision of courage and hope and not despair.”

By the time we got to January 8, 2013 she was beginning to tire, but she was also just four days away from her eighty-fourth birthday. She never said out loud that she wanted to live until then, but that’s how it felt as I sat in the room with her. On January 12 we sang to her and she had some cake, which was the last thing she ate. After that night, she didn’t drink anything. She died on January 15.

Aș we prepare to mark the seventh anniversary of her death, I have found solace in doing some of her favorite things. One of those, of course, is cooking. Saturday, I made her version of Taco Salad, which comes with its own story.

My mother was willing to give up lots of things to move ten thousand miles away from her Texas home and live in Africa, but I think the thing she missed most were Fritos corn chips. After three or four years, she wrote the president of Frito-Lay, which was headquartered in Dallas, and said who she was and where she was and then asked what it would take to get Fritos to Zambia. A few weeks later we  received two big boxes that contained twenty-four vacuum-packed tins (think coffee cans) of Fritos.

She gave two each to my dad, my brother, and me for our personal consumption and kept the rest in the kitchen to make Taco Salad, which we had every Saturday until the chips ran out.

When we moved back to Houston for good, we had it every Saturday.

The recipe is not hard: ground beef seasoned with taco seasoning, kidney beans, cheddar cheese, shredded lettuce, ranch dressing, and Fritos. I made it Saturday and we ate it all.

The other thing I have done this past week is puzzle. My mother liked jigsaw puzzles so much she made it a verb. Ginger gave me a puzzle of a VW bus for Christmas that came in a tin shaped like a VW bus because I have always wanted one. I did that puzzle last week. When I posted it on Facebook, a church member brought me a couple of others. Last night we started working on a puzzle of the doors of Paris–1,000 pieces–and I finished it tonight.

The two puzzles brought back memories of the card table in our den in Houston that always had a puzzle working. I can remember coming in at night after being out with friends and then staying up way to late because I would get pulled in to trying to find just one more piece. Sometimes, Mom would join me. Both the kitchen and the card table were places where she met me and I felt at home.

I wrote a poem last week saying that a puzzle is not a good metaphor for life because there is more to living that getting all the pieces to fit. When I finished the VW puzzle, I rethought my poem because one piece was missing. I didn’t lose it. It was never in the box. I finished the puzzle and had to live with it being incomplete. I thought, “Maybe sometimes life is like a puzzle.”

But the puzzles this week have not been metaphors; they have been a way to live with my grief that has led to gratitude along with the sadness; in their own way, I suppose, an act of hope and not despair.

Peace,
Milton

For the last seven years the first two weeks of January have belonged to my mother. She went into hospice just after New Year’s Day 2016 and died on January 15, three days after her eighty-fourth birthday. I got to spend all of those days with her.

Tonight, this story came back to find me.

In the summer of 1971, we came back to Fort Worth, Texas on leave from Africa. I was going into the tenth grade. My ninth grade year had been my favorite year of school to date because of the friends I had made and also because of the “folk group,” as we called it–a bunch of us who got together to play guitars and sing. That fall, I went to Paschal High School (Go, Panthers!) and became a part of the youth group at University Baptist Church. The group was welcoming and vibrant and pulled me in like I had been there the whole time. I loved being a part of it because I felt kind of lost.

Once I learned to name my depression, I look back to that year and can see it was with me then. For all of the good things happening, I can remember sitting on the edge of my bed and looking in the mirror and wishing I was anyone else but me.

That October they had a Halloween party at church, which meant costumes. My mother went all in on things like parties and costumes. She said she’d help me figure out a great costume. She had the sewing chops to make it, too. I decided I wanted to be a clown. We found some fabric to make a good outfit, a nose, and some makeup as well, but we couldn’t find a wig. Since I was a teenaged boy in 1971, I had long hair. Mom said, “We’ll just curl yours.”

And so we did.

Early that Saturday afternoon, she took a whole bunch of little rollers and put them all over my head. I couldn’t really go anywhere, so I sat on the couch to watch football with my dad, as we had done most Saturdays that fall. Dad was fidgety and kind of grumpy. It was weird–and I took it personally. I got up and went into the kitchen, where Mom usually was. I was visually upset. When she asked what was wrong, I said, “I don’t think this is masculine enough for Dad.”

I knew it wasn’t. We already were at odds over my hair. Now I was wearing curlers and already carried my own sense that I was enough, period.

Mom rolled her eyes. “Listen,” she said. “You don’t have to be masculine enough for him. This is a great costume. You’re going to be great. Ignore him and go have fun.”

I made it through the afternoon, got dressed and went to the party. My hair looked like a clown wig. The makeup completely disguised me. Mom dropped me off around the corner so no would recognize the car, and I decided not to speak and see how long it was before anyone recognized me. Nobody did. I finally spoke up after a half hour or so, excited because I had pulled it off. When I got home and told Mom, she was elated.

None of us ever revisited that afternoon because that was not our family way. As I have often said, we talked about our feelings every fifteen years or so, whether we needed to or not. The sense that I wasn’t the man Dad wanted me to be didn’t begin that afternoon. Over time I learned to see at as different perspectives on what masculinity meant. At different times I was also aware of expectations that my mother had that I didn’t fulfill, but the woman who taught me to cook and curled my hair one October afternoon helped to give me a sense of myself that I have not forgotten.

Peace,
Milton

On this Twelfth Night, this Epiphany Eve, i found myself going back through some old posts and poems. I wrote the first version of the poem below when we lived in Marshfield, Massachusetts in a house 660 feet from Cape Cod Bay. Walking the beach at low tide was a regular part of our lives. I am a long way from those shores, but I spent some time with the words again, made a few changes, and felt like it was a good word for tonight.

camelless

the Christmas tide is going out
the waves of wonder that crashed
against the sea wall of my heart
are receding, reminding me that
tides come and go, neap and spring
such is the rhythm of redemption

in my mind’s eye I still see the
Magi meandering, starry-eyed
along the now silent sands
the newly exposed beach is not
a breach, but an opening an
epiphany: Greek for “I get it now!”

come, let us walk along the shore,
wandering and wondering our
way between wall and water
between Herod and hope to
write our names in the sand
and see how long they last

The last two lines gave me pause when I think of so many people I love whose names the tide has taken away. Grief, it seems has its own epiphany. I get it now.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. I write a free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors that comes out every Tuesday. I would love for you to subscribe. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a sustaining member or buy me a cup of coffee.

In my newsletter yesterday, I leaned into a quote from Kieran Setiya. The last sentence reads,

Don’t let the lure of the dramatic arc distract you from the digressive amplitude of being alive.

I have been dealing with the article for a couple of days, but I didn’t notice the phrase “digressive amplitude” until I say down to write tonight. I had to look up definitions of both words to get what he was saying.

digressive: tending to depart from the subject
amplitude: breadth, range, or magnitude
digressive amplitude: the magnitude that tends to depart from the subject.

Hold that thought.

When I woke this morning, the day appeared to offer the promise of sunshine, so I set off for my periodic Costco run in hopes that the afternoon would be as bright as the temperature was unseasonably warm. By the time I crossed the Connecticut River, the fog had rolled back in. The return trip home was a journey into a deepening gray horizon. Something about the day made me question myself, an existential exercise I can fall into too easily. I could feel the pull to escape the weight of the day by sleeping through it.

I was determined not to give in. I took the Schnauzers for a walk around the Green, but was still fading when we got back. Finally, I told Ginger I was going to see who needed rides instead of giving into the Nap Monster awaiting me on the couch. At least, I thought to myself, I can be useful and help someone get where they’re going. Lyft encouraged me with some bonus offers if I drove during certain hours, so off I went to New Haven.

I have learned that Union Station is a good place to start. I was about three minutes away when I received a request to pick someone up there and take them to East Haven–about a ten minute drive. He had ridden the train from Virginia, where he had spent two weeks with family. He looked like he had hiked for two weeks–and loved it. In the course of our conversation, I found out his dad has a friend in Guilford who makes wine in his basement.

The next passenger was a young woman with a small baby who went from one house to another without saying much, other than wishing me well. Then I picked up a young woman and took her to a strip center in Woodbridge and dropped her off at a store called Clay Time. She stayed silent for most of the trip. After she got out of the car, I pulled into a parking place to answer a few text messages. I got a request for a ride about two minutes later and it was the same person going back to where I had picked her up.

She smiled when I pulled up. Turns out she was just picking up a project she had completed. Something about our brief familiarity created space for conversation. I asked if she was a potter and she said she was learning. As we talked, I made some comment about putting the batter on the wheel (meaning the clay) and said something about my days in the kitchen making me think in cooking terms. She asked if I was a chef and that took things a whole different direction. I then asked what kind of work she did only to find out she was in high school and worked part time at a daycare center. She talked about how much she liked the people she worked with and then she said, “It seems like whatever you do is okay if you like the people you work with.” I agreed.

The address for the next pickup was a 7-Eleven. When I pulled in, two young men in Orthodox Jewish attire got in the car. They were talkative from the moment we left the parking lot. I learned there is a Jewish boarding school in New Haven. One of the guys had come from Tampa and the other from just outside Worcester, Massachusetts. At one point, the younger one called somebody to tell them he had gotten posters for something. The person on the other end must have been surprised at how quickly it had happened because the guy in the car said, “How did I do it so quickly? Because I have a great Lyft driver, that’s how.”

I was about ready to call it an evening when one more alert came up. Someone needed a ride from the CVS next to the New Haven Green to the Lulu Lemon store about a mile away. The woman who got in the car had left her headband that covered her ears on the train and Lulu Lemon had the replacement. By this time it had started to rain a bit. I asked if she was going to need a ride home after her shopping and she said she would. I told her I would wait, so she added the stop to her ride, bought her head band, and we kept going, as did our conversation. By the time I dropped her off at her apartment, we had found connections in Puerto Rico, teaching high school English, Yale Divinity School, and the love of Schnauzers.

Now back to the quote. Here is a larger piece of it:

Whatever story you tell about yourself, however simple and straightforward, there is endlessly more to your actual life. As Joe Moran insists: “To call any life a failure, or a success, is to miss the infinite granularity, the inexhaustible miscellany of all lives … A life can’t really succeed or fail at all; it can only be lived.” . . . The more you appreciate the sheer abundance of incident, the more you’ll see any life as an assortment of small successes and small failures, and the less prone you will be to say, despairingly, “I’m a loser”—or with misplaced bravado, “I’m a winner!” Don’t let the lure of the dramatic arc distract you from the digressive amplitude of being alive.

This time around, I can also see “infinite granularity” and “inexhaustible miscellany.” In my personal exhaustion, I drove around in the inexhaustible miscellany of the lives I helped get from station to home, store to store, all of it happening within a five mile radius of downtown New Haven. The digressive amplitude–the magnitude of miscellany,–pulled me out of my sad story and into “the sheer abundance of incident,” as Setiya calls it, that makes life, well, life.

And, when I got home, Ginger and I had spaghetti for dinner. It is, after all, National Spaghetti Day.

Peace,
Milton

All this week (wait–it’s only Tuesday!) I have been reading different takes on resolutions for the year ahead. A couple of them stood out to me. One was this picture of Woody Guthrie’s “New Year’s Rulin’s” from 1943. My favorites were 17-20:

17. don’t get lonesome
18. stay glad
19. keep hoping machine alive
20. dream good

Another is a list of resolutions by Jacob Zweig from 2018, but it showed up in no less than five places for me. A couple that stood out:

Never try to get other people to change their minds without first trying to understand why they think the way they do. Never do that without being open to the possibility that the mind that might need to change the most could be your own.

Work harder at making the familiar strange. Walk or drive a different route than your daily routine; work away from your desk; read something flamboyantly irrelevant; call someone you don’t need to call; look up at the sky instead of the concrete. When you turn back to your routine, it will feel freshened.

Befriend someone at least 20 years younger than you, and someone at least 20 years older than you. Each of you will make the other smarter and better.

The deepest roots of the word resolution go back to the fourteenth century: “a breaking or reducing into parts; process of reducing things into simpler forms.” The word resolve breaks down into re (again) and solve (to loosen, untie, release, explain). The roots are interesting to me because when people talk about making New Year’s resolutions I can feel my body stiffen. They feel like extra pressure, extra complications, extra obligations–not breaking things into simpler forms.

My point here is not to trash resolutions as a practice. We all need moments to reset and re-solve our lives, figure out again who we are and who we hope to be in the world. If the beginning of a new year is a mark that works for you, then work it. What I am listening to is the invitation to to reduce things into simpler forms. I am an excellent complicator. I want to lose weight, get in shape, play my guitar more, write everyday, learn how to bake bread, and play pickle ball all at once.

All of those things need my attention. What is the simpler form? How can I live in a way that sets me free rather than binds me up?

Woody had a pretty good sense of it, I think. Look back at his list. It revolves around daily tasks, personal and professional habits, and, of course, fighting fascism. The prophet Micah pared it down to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly, though I don’t know that he had any sense of what New Year’s Day was about. I like Micah’s big brush alongside of Woody’s sense of the impact of little things and small measures. They make quite a team.

One draft of this post ended with a list of simple things for the year ahead, but I deleted it (from the post, not from my thoughts) because my reason for writing was not to post my intentions for the days to come. I’m still sorting out what life is going to look like for more reasons than the change of year, and, as I said, resolutions are not usually part of my practice.

Instead, I want to sit with the idea of making life simpler, breaking it down to its essence: How do I stay true to what matters most to me? That feels so simple that it will take a year to answer.

Peace,
Milton

I planned for a couple of hours of driving late this afternoon. I had not had much reason to get out of the house today and driving a few people around New Haven felt like a good idea. Around 2:30 I drove into town, thinking I would start at Union Station. Sure enough, I was about four blocks away when the Lyft app pinged to see if I was available. I hit the purple “Accept” button and made my way to the station.

The man who got in was not going far. He lived about three miles from the station, straight down State Street. I dropped him off and wound my way back to the edge of the New Haven Green when I heard the ping once more. In a short time, they have trained me well to respond. The person requesting a ride was back at Union Station. I pulled in right at 3 o’clock and a man walked toward the car, accompanied by a woman and a little girl. I slid the bar in the app that lets it know I had picked up my charges and then I noticed when we were expected to arrive at their destination: 5:25.

I had signed on to drive to Linden, New Jersey, one hundred miles away; that should be a two hour trip. I looked at the map and saw a succession of red lines along the route, indicating traffic problems. I pulled out of the station and into the traffic.

We worked our way down I-95 to I-287 and then cut down the Hutchinson Parkway to the Sawmill Parkway to the Henry Hudson Parkway to the George Washington Bridge that took us across the Hudson River. They talked among themselves for the most part, other than to ask me if there was a way to charge their phones. As we moved from parkway to parkway, the arrival time kept moving as well. We crossed the GW at sunset, which was around five, and that was the one time I wished the traffic had stopped. The sky was completely clear and the last rays of sunlight–that amazing shade of peach and red and orange all layered into one another–colored the air that hung behind the skyline of New York and the Hudson.

It was awe-inspiring, even in heavy traffic and even when the app changed to say we wouldn’t get to Linden until 6:25.

Once we cleared the bridge and the logjam on the other side, the instructions on the map told me to exit to the Alexander Hamilton Rest Area. I asked the man if he had scheduled the stop and he said no, but asked if I needed to. It was then I figured out that the app knew I had been driving for almost two and a half hours and was designed to make sure I got a break. The family was also ready to get out of the car for a bit, even though we were only about forty minutes from their house, so we stopped. He asked if I wanted a coffee and I declined. I went to the restroom and came back to the car to call Ginger and catch her up on my adventure.

When the family returned, the man knocked on my window before he got in the back and handed me a cup of coffee.

“I thought you would like it,” he said.

I thanked him and we got back on the road. Something in the stop started a conversation. He kept talking.

“In India, if you are traveling with a driver, when you stop the driver is treated like family. He eats what the family eats and joins them.”

“I love that,” I said and thanked them again for the coffee. I asked what part of India they were from (“The north,” he said.) and how long they had been in the US. She and the little girl had come about eighteen months ago; he had only been here a year. He went on to say they had lived in Japan for eight years before coming here, so it had been a long time since they had lived in India.

“I speak Japanese,” the little girl said and giggled.

I asked if they came to New Haven often. What I learned is that she and the girl live there. He is in New Jersey for his work. They travel back and forth frequently. I let the rest of my questions go unasked because I didn’t want them to feel interrogated. He had questions of his own. He asked where I lived.

I told him and he followed up wondering why I had been willing to drive so far. I told him part of it was I was still learning how to use the app and didn’t realize what I had agreed to do, and part of it was I had time to do it.

“We feel like three hours has been a long time, but you have to do it twice. Thank you. I hope you can find someone to drive back that will make the drive home worth it.”

Suffice it to say Linden, New Jersey is not the reason they call it the Garden State. The traffic was heavy, even the shops looked industrial. We turned a couple of blocks off of the main artery we had taken from the freeway and into the parking lot of a weary apartment building. They got out and we said our goodbyes. I watched them go in the building and then I pulled back into the traffic to work my way home.

Because of the rest area, Hamilton was in my head, so I asked Siri to play it as I drove back across the Hudson. At first, I was playing around with the opening number because my name has the same number of syllables–

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
My name is Milton Brasher-Cunningham
and there’s so many things I haven’t done
but just you wait

I played around with the verses for a few miles, amusing myself, and then kept listening to the soundtrack. A few songs later, as Hamilton and his pals sang together in the tavern, I heard their words in a new way because of my unexpected journey:

and when our children tell our story…
they’ll tell the story of tonight . . .

Whether any children tell it or not, it was fun telling you.

Peace,
Milton