Author: tlee

I’m editing my mom’s essays and this paragraph cracked me up so much:

“In old days in Asia if grandma or grandpa reached the time to go, their son bring them to deep forest in mountain and leave them there.”

I just am wild about that sentence. I love it to death. This matter-of-fact, harsh way of dealing tickles me endlessly. Ugh, what a gem.

Here’s the solution to our aging population crisis in the U.S. you guys! See you on that mountain, Mom!

P.S. It might be one of those things that only I find funny.

One of my favorite foods is eggplant. I love eggplant parm; pasta dishes with tomato; ricotta and eggplant; roasted eggplant, whatever.

I once took my folks to Moustache, a Middle Eastern place in the West Village, years ago where we had babaganoush. They both enjoyed it. There, Dad mentioned how his family hid out on a farm during the Korean War where they ate eggplant until it was safe to come back to cities, and he said he now hated eggplant as a result.

I always felt sorry for him as a result. Then years later, Dad and I went to a wedding of one of his high school friends’ daughters at a fancy Manhattan restaurant (le circ maybe), after one of his chemo rounds. I encouraged him to have a martini, which may have been a mistake since he gulped it down and turned bright red immediately (oh dear. I cut him off). At lunch, one of his friends’ wives raved about the salad, how endive was her favorite food on earth, how once her son ordered an endive salad and she had ordered a plain salad, and how she was so jealous the entire time. I told her about my dad’s eggplant story and she said, “hey, he was lucky to have eggplant to eat.”

My dad very kindly dropped off some sandwiches for me. Two omelettes between sourdough toast with…a layer of peanut butter. Those elements do not go together, but I figure, what the heck, dementia sandwiches are better than no sandwiches, it’s a gross sandwich, but I’m kind of a gross person, plus I don’t want to hurt his feelings. It is nice of him to keep considering me at all during the chaos. But this time when I ate them, I got sick, so no more polite eating for me.

We warned First Son, but he didn’t believe us. He insisted on having an easter egg for dessert. When he opened it to discover egg and not chocolate, he was devastated and wept bitter tears. It was a little cute and sad. He is so very innocent.

You know, there’s so much cult of personality with Elisabeth Gilbert, but the woman write like a goddamn demon. Here are my favorite excerpts of this book:

Arresting though these images may have been, the dreams somehow did not disturb Alma. Instead, they filled her with the most astonishing sensation of synthesis—as though all the most disparate elements of her biography were at last knitting together. All the things that she had ever known or loved in the world were stitching themselves up and becoming one thing. Realizing this made her feel both unburdened and triumphant. She had that feeling again—that feeling she had experienced only once before, in the weeks leading up to her wedding with Ambrose—of being most spectacularly alive. Not mere alive, but outfitted with a mind that was functioning at the uppermost limits of its capacity—a mind that was seeing everything, and understanding everything, as though watching it all from the highest imaginable ridge.
She would awaken, catch her breath, and immediately begin writing again.

“I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker,” he continued, as though he had not heard her. “We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and it grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.”

“You think me naïve,” Wallace said.
“I think you marvelous,” Alma corrected. “I think you are the most marvelous person I have ever met, who is still alive. You make me feel glad that I am still here, to meet somebody like you.”
“Well, you are not alone in this world, Miss Whittaker, even if you have outlived everyone. I believe that we are surrounded by a host of unseen friends and loved ones, now passed away, who exert an influence upon our lives, and who never abandon us.”

–A Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert

I resisted this Oprah-sanctioned book, its mainstream appeal is repellant to me, but then I caught a bit of the film. It intercuts images of the past across the screen while the character has a voiceover about ordering a bagel, or whatever, and that feels much like life to me — where you know, time goes out of order in your brain. So, the book, my god, turned out to be the most encouraging piece of literature. The descriptions of the physical and mental challenges of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, her feet shredding nails, etc., but it reminds me of how hard some parts of life are, and it introduced me to a whole slew of great Winston Churchill quotes, for which I am grateful. Who knew that guy was so positive? I always want to give up but he says NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP. sheesh! Just what the doctor ordered.

when I read this novel in my twenties, I was so struck by the tragedy of this story — that two people who feel true love to not pursue it for the sake of propriety and their families. I reread that book as a middle-aged woman, and this time, I was like, Big Whoop.

just stuff he says:

i choose you. i kill you.

parents go to work. children stay at home.

mom, get out of my bat cave

me: what’s the nice way to say it

he says, mom, please get out of my bat cave

all of this is said in a low bat voice

I love First Son’s kindergarten teacher. I have no idea if she’s doing a good job or not with the kids, but on back to school night, she presented herself as a former dancer who fell in love with sciences. In addition to informing us what the kids were going to learn throughout the year, she taught us “in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight” with sign language, which the kids do at the end of each day. (How freaking adorable is that? However a classmate’s mom who is studying sign language wasn’t sure the signs were actually sign words.) They have class ladybugs and snails and monarch butterflies they set free (I think now that’s it getting colder, maybe they will no longer release “wild life” back into nature. But what do I know. I always ask First Son how Fred is doing, a name I gave to one of the ladybugs, in an effort to get him to tell me something about the day. He has shut down any access to information, well before adolescence has kicked in. I want to know stuff. He tells me a kid bit him during lunch, but it may have been that the kid “pretend-bit” him, mimed biting. I mean, how are we going to keep track of these obscure stories? But it is the teacher’s job to decipher these elusive conflicts and situations, not mine.

This feels like an innocent time, where gym consists of waving a rainbow parachute to bounce a ball in the air. (Wow. I wish. My gym time? The treadmill! the Trudge Mill! The run-of-the-mill, occasional sit-up set). I also love this teacher because she is psyched for this job. It’s her first year in this position after a long career teaching this age group, so she’s not burned out. She said quite simply that she knew she was important because she is a kindergarten teacher, that she still remembers the name of her kindergarten teacher. If only I could also feel that self-possessed and confident! Let me practice here:

Yes, I know I am important, because I am a mother. And I still remember the name of my mother…

Ha ha ha

Speaking of uncomfortable and stupid, a few years ago, I remember my doctor left a message for me on my cell at 11 at night to call him back. I figured it was something horrible, so I allowed myself 24 hours of fun before I braced myself for “the call that changes everything.” I went to a museum, had a lovey lunch with wine, etc. because I knew if the next chapter was going to suck, I wanted a little fun before I dove back into it and had a good memory to turn to when the sh*t hits the fan. When we finally spoke, he said I was pregnant, which was impossible at the time but I said, that’s okay, pregnancy is a healthy person’s problem, we will figure it out. In the end, it turned out it was a lab mixup. Anyway, I found my very sensible plan very funny so I tell the story as a joke but my in-laws were like dead quiet when I passed the story on.