Cooking in my Dotage
It’s time. I’m seventy-one and the clock isn’t going backwards. I’m at the age when so many of my friends are streamlining their lives, cutting back, making their lives simpler. Boxes of books they will never read again off to Friends of the Library, the silver apportioned out to the kids--let them polish it, letters of resignation to committees that don’t listen to them anyway. Takeout instead of time-consuming recipes. Me? I walked into my kitchen just now, scanned the thousand or so cookbooks on my shelves and thought, Cripes (actually, the word I said began with an F). Why don’t I cook more?
This led to a long, winding train of thought as I did my laundry. Time for the washer and dryer (though not often enough) but when was the last time I got out my watercolors? This type of musing usually leads to short-lived resolutions. I’m going to be a better person, clean my closets and put things where they belong when I’m finished with them and exercise before my coffee every morning. That sort of drivel. But something about those cookbooks gave me a pang. I don’t want to be a better person. Maybe I want to change myself, but I can’t. I’ve been trying ever since my mother told me to be good when I was a little girl and couldn’t figure out what that meant, only certain that if she had to say that, it wasn’t what I was. I am old enough now to know what I am. An occasionally lazy (witness four bags of laundry instead of the one-load-every-time-it-accumulates promise to myself), occasionally big-hearted (some serious volunteering on my resume), reasonably creative (two cookbooks and a number of articles published in the mainstream), sometimes insightful (unless you count the failed relationships), generally life-loving septuagenarian who engages in too much clutter and self-denial.
The clutter is a lost cause; the self-denial issue is on the table.
The question was: why am I not cooking more? And taking more pictures with my expensive camera gear, and letting my pretty clothes go out of style in the closet waiting for a special occasion. The age-old question, pardon the pun, why do I put my life on hold? Well, I’m not a slacker, but at least the part that involves more fun, more self-expression, more experimentation. Because that is who I am. Someone who craves those things. What am I waiting for? I’m retired, I have time to myself, unlived dreams. Perhaps the taste for them is so keen because don’t allow myself to indulge them, or set up my life so that my watercolors are always on the counter. This is not about analyzing my motives for the way I live my life, but living it more the way I want to, by doing the things that give me pleasure. At least once a day. I’m not out to change the world, to learn a language (that torture comes under the heading improving myself, not pleasure, with apologies to my beloved French teacher, Marc).
It is about not closing my computer right now because my friend Jane is coming from the east coast for a sleep-over and I haven’t cleaned behind the oven. It is about finishing this piece because I love doing it. Because one thing I am is a writer, whether good or bad is not the issue. I am enjoying myself, not talking myself out of doing this for all the cockamamie reasons I can come up with, a writer’s occupational hazard. It is about wanting to come to the end of my life not saying, I wish I’d had more fun, but putting some insurance into that plea by deciding right now to fix a crispy romaine salad with apples and blue cheese and find a dressing in Thomas Keller that will use the bottle of expensive white Balsamic vinegar my fave (and only) son-in-law gave me that I’ve been saving for a special occasion, the hidden message being, I’m not special enough.
My commitment is for at least fifteen to twenty minutes of fun, pleasure, indulgence every day, on my own, not because I’m sharing a good time with friends. That I do very well. What is hard and what I hope will become contagious, is setting aside time to do something that is consciously, not accidentally, pleasing. Something that says, this is exactly me, being me. If it makes me a better person, hey, there’s room. And if it doesn’t, if everything else about me stays the same, then too bad for me that I get to my deathbed bed saying, I had more fun than I ever imagined. Now where’s that white Balsamic vinegar.
