A Dinner Party

J and I had dinner last night with Hugh and Janet Gilmore. Nothing effortful, just an end-of-the-week shared takeout nosh. We sat on the deck in their backyard  eating Thai food and drinking beer and listening to the catbirds calling out for love anld a one-bedroom condo in Chestnut Hill.
These are the kind of friends who let you drop the barriers a bit and we came to the part of the evening-the mango and sweet rice dessert-when you tell the truths about your families. Hugh asked me something about my parents-he wondered if my mother's Irish family thought she was going to hell for marrying a Jew. I had to tell him that it was both worse and better than that. Worse because she became Jewish herself (a Jewess, they used to say) and better because my mom's sisters loved my father. They doted on him in a way that's almost impossible to imagine these days. They even called him-their brother-in-law- "Uncle Manny". One aunt always brought him a footstool when he sat in her living room, another would fetch the ashtray.
I guess they indulged him partly because he was an unashamedly doting husband. and partly because he was generous with them in a way that they had heard about but never experienced. He did so much right by them that they thought he could do no wrong.
Anyway, somehow in the middle of telling this story, I started to cry. It's not a sad story except in the way that all our stories are sad, but I had pointed a dousing rod at some big spring of sadness and I kept on with my story, crying into some very good beer (Victory Golden Monkey in the big bottle).

So later, I found myself wondering where that rush of lugubriousness came from. I'm not especially sentimental about my father: he and I did the best we could, but we only managed moments of closeness. No blame, just different souls. As I tried to puzzle it out, it seemed to me that I wasn't remembering him so much as I was living for a minute in his time, sensing his loneliness, maybe rolling it up into mine. Maybe we just naturally travel back in time as we get older. Or maybe it's just time to say how much I miss what I missed and time to give it the crying that it's due. I guess it could be that I'm sad that I'm finishing up without having earned that sort of love or maybe it just reminded me that my kid and I may be no closer than Manny and his kid. If I didn't have this blog, I'd probably write a poem about it.
It was a good, unstoppable cry, one that may have even washed away the regret that set it off. Our hosts didn't look too embarrassed and we all pay the meat bill eventually-so why throw in a little salt?

A Modest Offering

A Modest Offering in the Service of Art

Don't Starve

This post is for you readers with your own cancer drama. Everybody else, skip to the bottom of the page where there's a wry little ditty about food and cooking.
•   •   •
Are they gone? Good.
Why should I be the only one who gets some good ideas from this cancer-go-round of mine? I discovered a solution to a problem that may come up for you. I pretty much stopped eating around the end of my radiation. I couldn't swallow very well, my mouth was too dry for me to chew properly and I was nauseated most of the time. I got no help from a bunch of anti-nausea drugs and there's no medical marijuana in pennsylvania. I kept track of my intake for a while: 700 calories a day on the average, maybe a thousand on  good day.
So naturally, the weight melted off me. How much? It's hard to know where to start counting, but maybe I was 175 lbs (80kg) when this started and 135 (61) lbs at the worst. I may have already mentioned that I looked like a peking duck without the shellac or one of those guys from the bataan death march. By a body-fat calculation that I had done about a year before the diagnosis, I had 153 lbs (70kg) of lean body mass. That means that I was losing muscle, maybe ten kilos of it. Wasting away, Streets of Philadelphia and all that.
But enough about me. Here's what I wish I had known. Forget about tricking yourself into eating. Nothing's going to taste good and you're not going to be hungry. What you need is something that acts like food and goes in like medicine. Something you can decide to swallow that will preserve your muscle and won't make you vomit.
Here's what I want you to do-it worked for me after the worst of the nausea had gone.  Assemble:

Whole Grain High Protein Cereal like Kashi Go Lean
Protein powder
fruit, fresh or frozen
milk and maybe some yogurt

Remember the banana: just think of William Tell
shooting one off his kid's head.

Measure a cup (250ml) of the cereal into a blender jar. Add the fruit and a cup or more of milk. Blend it thoroughly until the mixture loses its grit. Add a scoop of the protein powder and blend some more. If you used frozen fruit, the result will be thick and cold and easily worth 450 calories and thirty grams of protein. The whole grain cereal is also high in fibre which takes care of that other digestive problem that we don't talk about much.
Stock up on frozen berries and mangoes if you can, use flavorings if they help you ( I made vanilla extract from a Madagascar vanilla bean and grain alcohol). Whey protein is absorbed quickly, casein protein leaves you feeling full-take your pick. Make a breakfast date with yourself every morning and slam one of those down. I never tried adding a shot of rum, but why not? What harm can it do, give you cancer?


I'm back at the gym now and I weigh just under 150 lbs. and I still have my morning shake. If this helps, let me know. If you have other ideas about fooling the appetite and saving the body, let me know and I'll pass them on. Most important thing: Don't Starve.

•   •   •

Kitchen Philosophies

The old chef said "At the end of the day,

how you practice is how you play."

The pastry chef had a different view

"Don't waste your truffles and cutlets on stew."

The apprentice listened and couldn't agree

she said "the best thing out of this kitchen is me."

(Bennie the fry cook just sat on his ass

and drank red wine from a water glass.)

Ramon, the dishwasher, ventured a joke 

as he took a break for a nip and a smoke

"It's a very good day when I give it my best

and don't hear a word from the INS.

Say what you'll do and do what you say-

the rest is all compost and gets carted away."

The Good News

The doctor says 'Don't bite me!' as he gets ready to make you want to do just that. His voice is angry, urgent-'don't bite me or else I'll run this ocean liner up on the damn iceberg, y'hear?' he seems to be saying.
Then it's the old shoehorn in the mouth, fist down the throat, hot sterilized mirror on your cheeks and tongue.
He's gonna do a biopsy of the little growth. Probably a harmless papilloma, he says, but we gotta make sure. He also schedules another PET scan for the end of June. This is the so-called 'gold standard' of cancer detection in the head and neck, but as I remember, we went off the gold standard a few decades back and for good reason. The exam is over in five minutes, my insurance company is billed and I'm walking to the garage by myself feeling slightly bored.
Burnholme Park surrounds the Fox Chase Cancer Center campus and the trees are in full summer leaf. It's cool and damp and I drive away glad that I lived to see it and glad that I can think of this visit as just part of a dull routine.

•   •   •

We have dinner at the brewpub with Gilmores, spend a couple of hours with Oscar Wilde at the theater across the street and head to J's house full of beer and contentment. There's an email waiting for me. It's from Jenn McCartney, the editor who rediscovered The Bachelor's Cat and is reprinting it for Christmas. I quote:

Hi Lynn,

We’re interested in your beer book—how would you feel about doing it in color? Either you could provide the images or we could give you access to our stock photos sites and you could find the pertinent images..

Let me know if that’s something that interests you and we can discuss details!

Best,

Jenn

  I'm too sleepy to react much, all I feel is happy and proud. Another one of my babies gonna do all right, with me or without. It's a three-book year and so to bed.

Have a Nice Day (if you dare)

Today, I drove through the Pine Barrens to a little meadow near the Atlantic Culinary Academy and, with gray clouds rolling by overhead, sat through a pretty decent commencement speech and walked away with my culinary arts degree. Now, there are more layers in that experience than in a well-made croissant and during the long drone of calling the graduates, I got to think about most of them. Sweet. Bitter. The whole complicated business of sweet delayed recognition and the sense, as the young people filed up one by one by never-ending one, of time passing by was like a live Morality play. I think the moral was something like: the Impermanence of Things. Or maybe it was: Use More Salt and Drink Better Wine. Hard to tell.

Any way, I spent an hour after the ceremony hanging out with the faculty, watching them pack up and head off for summers as personal chefs or culinary tour guides. These are remarkable, focussed people, extraordinarily dedicated to their profession and their students. Good guys. The dean is a mensch, or maybe that should be a menschette. They mostly seem to like me, I certainly liked being with them. If you've ever had a gang at work-people who made you glad you punched in, you know what I mean.

Then I came home and in the mail, there was a magazine called Off the Coast (spring 2011). No, it's not about littoral assassination, it's one of those literary jobs and I had a poem in it. The poem is called The Would-be Lepidopterist. It's about a fellow who never really made anything of himself because he spent too much time admiring the bugs and smelling the flowers. It's about missed opportunities and the penalty you pay for a lack of steely, business-like focus. There's this bit:

No eternity for those bugs or you
Just a messy, scaly insect stew
No dry forever on a pin
Just vanished scale on a dusty wing.

The poem actually verges close to the edge of expressing regret, but it's saved at the end by a towel-snap of irony.

Happy hit number three for the day. In fact, I was on a happy roll. Yesterday and the day before, I spent time with my daughter. Sweet time, rare time, and you know how pathetic we over-involved parents can be about stuff like that.
So how did I feel? All that good felling left me feeling suddenly scared-worried about my trip to the surgeon tomorrow, as if the sweetness of the days gave me more to lose. Maybe for the first time, I felt vulnerable.
And then Olghods (Our Lady of Getting Hip to your Own Dumb Self) paid me a visit while I was drinking a farmhouse ale and thinking things over. "The good stuff" she whispered "has to be endured too." Then she nibbled my earlobe. "Be brave." she said "It's a lot less work."

The Health Benefits of Cancer

I saw my cardiologist this week. He's a serious physician and a good guy. I haven't been in his office in a year and a half, so the last time he saw me, I weighed about 50 pounds more than I do now. When he sees me, he does a really good job of looking like he's not looking shocked.  Mostly he's empathizing-he examines the tattoos that they used to focus the radiation, he notes the lump where the chemo port is. He's a bit of a Yiddishist, so as he clucked, I said "For this, you kept me alive?", but his long face made me regret it immediately.
Then gradually, we go over my lab report. If I had studied up for the blood test, I couldn't have done better. My cholesterol is lower than my IQ (which itself is declining fast). The good cholesterol and the bad cholesterol are identical. If my triglycerides were expressed in thousand dollar bills, you couldn't buy a Lexus. Glucose? He notes that it's a bit low.
All this good news is driven by weight loss. Skinny people have healthier hearts, they say. I've been thinking about a self-help health book. Title ideas include Benign Malignancies, the X-Ray Diet, and for the beauty market- Be a Chemo Dreamboat.

How to Beat Cancer

I went to a meeting of the Wissahickon Brewers' Guild the other night. There was serious beer tasting, some serious talk about the difficulties of grinding unmalted wheat berries, some homemade cheese, a dozen different kinds of beer. Nice folks, very dear, lots of people glad to see me looking less corpse-like.It's a really sweet place to be and that's not even counting the beer.  Some body said "so you beat cancer? congratulations. How did you do it?"

The main truth of the matter, the first thing is this: you don't beat cancer, it beats the shit out of you, steals a year, takes your taste buds, your voice and any damn thing else. And that's if you're lucky. You may live through it buddybuddy, but you sure don't beat it.

There are actually only two ways to beat cancer and, again with luck, you can do 'em both. The first one is dying from something else first. Fire your cardiologist, take up skydiving or move to a really bad neighborhood. Naa-nanny-boo-boo cancer! 

The best one is this: If you live to spring, you take your dog for a walk in the woods. Maybe there's a tree in flower, maybe the dog sits under it. Maybe she turns slightly blue and becomes the other blue dogs in your life. Maybe she sits there under the tree looking like she'd fix it for you if she could, but she'll wait for you at the end either way. Maybe all your dogs rush out from the stream behind the tree and nuzzle your hand. The day that happens, you beat cancer.

•   •

Ear aches are getting worse. The dentist tells me that the little lump I'm feeling in my mouth is an oral papilloma and she doesn't want to do any work on my teeth until after the oncologist looks at it. She added something about zapping it with a laser. I don't imagine they'll let me drive the laser myself, but I'll let you know exactly how much fun the zapping is.

Here's What Matters.

I've been hoping that somehow this cancer would lead me to a few big ideas. I sort of have the idea that the whole business would be worthwhile if I came out of it-or at least came to the end of it-a little bit smarter than when I started. I haven't been completely disappointed, as you know if you've been reading this blog and managed not to gag at any of my matched pearl-handled epiphanies.
Today's new big idea started with a weird telephone call. It was from the manager in a Center City restaurant- a Japanese place where I've never been. The nice young man wanted me to know that a certain Jeffrey Smith had called him and wanted to buy me dinner and when would I like to come in.
Jeff was a student of mine back in the Nixon years. He was an army veteran, doing college on a Vietnam scholarship. I was a graduate student teaching something or other. We talked a lot and after he left school, we caught up with each other every decade or so-bars in New York, cantinas in Miami. No small talk-there never was time-just the rush of whataya know and ain't it great. You may see some of his comments on earlier posts. Most of them don't make sense in the ordinary way, but they do make something more important, they set off chains of connections that drill down deep if you let 'em.

Any way-I was deeply moved by his gesture, I might have been a little weepy even. It wasn't the dinner, it was the sheer kindly genius (generosity plus originality) of the thing and it brought back all the flames of kindness that have come my way since this damn thing started. The rides to radiation and the bowls of soup and visits and the smiles pointing to the right direction when I  thoroughly lost my way. In fact, when I thought about all those acts, all that generosity-when I herded all those little lights together, the effect was blinding. I was dazzled into thinking that maybe kindness is the only thing that matters. Not wit, not accomplishment, not even getting your poems published or seeing your kid do okay in law school. Yeah, maybe kindness is the big human Everest. How the hell did I miss that all these years?
I called Jeff to thank him and he told me-in a rush of his own poetry-what was behind his picking up the tab for dinner for the cancerman: he was thinking about some things I said to him, some things that he thought were helpful, some things that he thought were kind. Not necessarily clever or beautiful, but kind. Big wheel keeps on turnin' , don't it?

I probably should have known this-Manny Hoffman was kind and generous to most people, Mary Grace Hoffman-when she wasn't racked by fear- was too. I've always been attracted to kindly people, my ex-wife, her mom, J, Gilmore, B, Peter, the friends that mean the most to me (you know who you are). I even had two great dogs as teachers, but alas, I've always been a little too defensive to be truly kind -in spite of all those good examples.
 It took throat cancer and a dinner tab to make the point: so Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd like to propose a toast.

To Kindness and the Kindly, no art and no artist

are closer to the Divine, more soaked in the 

Buddha-nature, more noisily beautiful,

more quietly grand.

Tombstoning

Tombstoning, verb.   To accumulate accolades or accomplishments whose main purpose is to further your career after you're dead.
•  •
I just found out that I'm going to be awarded an honorary degree. Now you probably know somebody with  an honorary degree-a doctorate maybe or an LLD, but I'll bet I'm the first person you know who's this happy about it. Here's the story:
Once upon a time, I started a culinary arts program at a local university. Back then, the idea of somebody studying culinary arts-learning to cook, learning to nourish-was just outlandish. College folks thought chefs were like car mechanics, people who trained somewhere else, took care of their occasional needs and definitely didn't wear mortarboards or attend faculty meetings. So there was a lot of resistance in college circles and if it weren't for the president liking the idea, it never would have happened: we ended up offering the first bachelor's in culinary arts in the country. It was a step toward chefs being seen as professionals and while it doesn't compare to what the food network did, it helped to change the way people thought about the people who cook for them.
One of the odd resistances that I met was from people in the university who asked me where I got my culinary degree. I don't have one. In fact, the option didn't exist for me back in the old days and I was making the whole thing up from scratch. But academics being what academics are, they always got to raise an eyebrow and everything I had to say about the importance, the seriousness and the beauty of cooking was diminished.
All this was a long time ago and there are culinary degrees all over the country now. Better yet, people who love to cook can entertain the idea that they have a calling, a craft, a profession and that it's at least as serious as let's say, cost accounting or clothing design or turf management or any of dozens of other things that you can study in college.
I love this stuff, I take it seriously. Even more so, I love the kids who love this stuff. I rejoice in the chances they have that food nerds in my generation didn't. I'm glad that the gender crap is gone and I'm glad there's an audience for careful work and a career ahead for careful workers.  It looks like my teaching days are over  and what happened to me doesn't matter so much now. But.

The Academy of Culinary Arts is granting me an honorary degree in culinary arts. It's an associate's degree. It's the degree that people get after two years of showing up for six hour classes at odd times of the day, after working a job or two and then dragging themselves to school and hoping that their kids and their spouses don't hold it against them. It's a hardscrabble degree, it smells like fry-max and it looks like a pile of soup bones and I'm so happy that I might cry.
•   •

To celebrate, J and I went out to dinner at Fuji. (When somebody says they're taking me out and I can pick the place, it's usually Fuji.) We didn't order, we just nodded to the chef and the food started coming and one-monkfish liver and caviar in a citrus broth- looked like this

and another one looked like this

I think there may be something to this culinary stuff and now I've got the degree to prove it.

Life Summary-Regrets

Every quote I could find about regret involves somebody bragging about how they don't traffic with regrets, how they put that stuff behind them and got on with whatever was getting on. I like the idea of living regret-free and I don't have much in my own active regret account. There's no doubt that people can make little godlets out of their regrets, even use them to explain themselves out of doing something in the here and now. So hooray for the jazz singer snapping out 'No Regrets'.
But something's missing in all this existentialist bravado: there's value as you look back in the things you did badly, in the times you were less when more was called for. I'm not recommending hair shirts or anything penitential, more like an honest embrace, a self-forgiveness without excuses. I can't say that I have the map for this particular Middle Path down yet, but being in a summarizing mood, here's where I am.

regrets in april



last fall you dropped regrets along the forest floor
the fresh ones just remembered
the ones you aged in casks
of explanation oak
the ones you kept and
the wons you lost.
the ones you grew out of and
the ones that grew out of you
and maybe the bhikku who takes care of you
(the buddha ranger pointing out danger)
trailed along behind and carrying a few regrets that
were just out of your reach,
tossed them farther off the trail until
like yellow leaves in the opalgray light of autumn dawn
there was a regret-filled frosting and then forgetful winter.



it’s april now. (you will not die ‘til late, late summer)
and along the dirt-scented trail
regret’s seedlings are arrayed,
forgiving, laughing, filled with beer and whistles
and in the woods the sprouts of the only all
you could be are bending slightly spritely with the  
birdish burden of a new generation
singing, calling like to like,
fortifying, leathering their nests,
forgiving last autumn’s leaves
and dancing, calling in the light.