The Vital Extras

I'm cooking again. I knew I was *really* cooking again one evening last week when I couldn't find one of the ingredients for something I was making and found myself pulling open cupboards and moving things around in the refrigerator, with the rusty wheels of that withered Food Prep portion of my brain cranking slowly back into motion and then beginning to whir: "What can I substitute? How can I alter this? And still have it edible?"

I don't remember what the dish in question was (it wasn't the night I couldn't find the block of cheddar that I was positive I bought and which David found several days later lurking behind the GatorAde six-pack -- no, on that night he picked up some grated cheese on the way home from work and dinner went as otherwise planned). What I remember was the exhilaration of having had a hitch in the gitalong and then working it out like I knew what I was doing!

Woohoo!

I've always felt like I'm a sad excuse for a cook. (Well, maybe you would have to have had Gloria for a mother-in-law, like I did, to totally get that.) Cookies -- oh, hell, yeah, I'll bake you cookies! Oatmeal, peanut butter, tollhouse, snickerdoodles -- mine were really fantastic. My sugar cookie recipe (which admittedly I got from my mother) made the absolute best Christmas cookies EVER, especially when decorated with buttercream frosting! Brownies -- don't get me started on my own brownies. But that and a few cakes (sour cream blueberry, for instance) was about where it ended. With everything else (you know, MEALS) I was faking it. I was sensitive and defensive and even though I got few actual complaints, there were little signals. Micah ate nothing but potatoes and breads for years. On extended-family picnics I was always assigned to bring soda and chips. Things like that.

So in spite of putting a meal on the table every night, my kitchen self-esteem was way way low.

Many pieces of my self-esteem were way way low by then, in fact. As early as elementary school it was pointed out to me that I can't sing. Personally I thought my voice was acceptable -- no Diana Ross, certainly, but okay for a kid. Apparently not to other ears, and that's tough for a kid who loved popular music and even not-so-popular music and who belonged to a church that stressed a lot of singing -- IN PARTS, no less. By junior high it had also been well-established (by those who passed for my friends) that I have no rhythm and cannot dance and should not even try, no matter what godawful freeform movements were being executed out on the dance floor by others. Mine were worse.

When I was working I pretty much stopped cooking along with stopping everything else I had done and enjoyed and felt fulfilled by, such as sewing and writing and drawing and anything having to do with yarn. And even though I inflicted my voice upon my immediate household, I felt bad about it, and I NEVER EVER sang where anyone to whom I had not given birth might hear me. We will not even discuss dancing. Nope, none of it, just the essentials, and none of those things are *essential.*

Well, yes they are -- they're *my* essence, they're essential to me, they're some of the things that make *me,* and I was without them for a long time. Years. There was the one moment with the singing: back in Arizona I located and joined a group in Tempe that was working its way through The Artist's Way, billed as a course for *blocked creatives,* and if there was ever a blocked creative, it was me. They met twice a month. They were excellent. I'm no longer in touch with a single one of them, I have no idea where they are now, but I love them.

They never could get me to dance. I cried a lot about that and they tried to help but I had shot myself in the foot on that one because the more I called attention to the fact that I had an issue with it, the more I simply could not even try. But aside from the Freedance sessions and all the art and the writing exercises and the going around the circle talking about how our lives were going and the encouragement to do (and share, if we wanted to) Morning Pages, aside from all of that and field trips and more, they had open mic every now and then and we were encouraged to get up and sing. To push our own envelopes, and for most of us, that meant singing, aloud, alone.

It took about a year. I practiced for awhile and I sang into a tape recorder and tried to listen critically (how off-key am I? I can't tell!), and finally one night I took the mic and sang, "Dream a Little Dream of Me." My audience was amazing. They neither moaned nor laughed. They smiled, they swayed along, and on the final fade-out they joined softly in.

The change in my attitude wasn't immediate, but it began there. Slowly I began to come back and it always felt to me like I was reclaiming lost bits of my soul. I went to school nights to learn bodywork and various healing techniques and suddenly I felt there was more to me than cracker winner (something thinner than breadwinner). I found and began hanging out a bit with my best friend from high school, Sue aka Sam aka Sioux, and she was about 300% into making detailed and cute-as-a-button wall quilts, which we began making together. On my way to the hospital to be there for Mikayla's birth I ran (literally) through the yarn shop on Main St and bought a lot of bright yarn to begin a sweater for her while we waited.

That was followed by more yarn. And more. After my recent and thrilling retirement, I began to sew a bit. The machine was a dusty mess, I can tell you.

I sing now. I sing in the car, I sing around the house, and if anyone anywhere says, "How does that song go?" I will sing it for them and, the thing is, when I stopped looking for them to wince, they stopped wincing. I recall sitting at a light with the windows down, singing along to "Jumprope Jive" on one of the Sandra Boynton albums (I think it's Philadelphia Chickens and no, I have no shame or inhibitions, I listen to kids' music in public), when a convertible pulled up beside me with two women in it. They looked at me and I looked back at them and continued singing and they began to seat dance. It was a great moment.

And now I'm cooking! (Speaking of jive ... but that's slang from an era even before my own.) A lot of the old recipes, adapted: we don't eat beef as a general rule, for instance, but ground turkey works nicely. David likes my meatloaf and my enchiladas, we're going good. A couple of nights ago I broke out the macaroni and cheese and the blueberry muffins and the broccoli. I think I had every mixing bowl of every size and a good share of the pans out, fanned all across the kitchen, along with my laptop for iTunes. We (the cats and I) started with the Beatles, and had a fantastic time, singing and dancing dinner into being.

I felt some sympathy for the guy next door, what with the way sound travels between close-set houses up here, but then I reminded myself that I don't always like the show tunes he sings on Sunday mornings while he's cooking, either. So there we are. (Great smells come from that house, though!)

Bit by bit I'm coming back to myself and sailing beyond where I've been before. It feels so good! Sometimes, I think, we have to be stripped all the way down to our bones before we can be brought back, fleshy and juicy and whole, and better than before.

Most recent puzzle and Maddox's If-It-Takes-Forever Baby Afghan, which, happily, did not quite: