Pieces of the Whole
Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
The moon outside my window tonight. It’s more beautiful than any image my humble camera could capture, but it is my lovely moon.
Lovely moon, from age to age, you continue to lit our dark path, to inspire our hearts, to reflect a greater glory.
Go slowly.
I’ve found a way to keep the Christmas spirit all year around — even though the best evidence of that comes in December.
As many of you know, I’m an avid knitter. So avid, in fact, it caused tendonitis a year ago. I’ve been knitting since I was 19, and there are countless pieces out there I’ve created. Some I’ve even designed myself.
Over the years I’ve used this gift (and I truly consider knitting to be a gift) from time to time to make items for charitable giving. My current endeavor is hats for those who come to my church’s food bank. Every year we have the Giving Tree, and people hang cold weather items such as hats, scarves, mittens on it during December.
Those items are available for a group of people in need, some homeless, some struggling to keep a roof over their heads. All struggling to get enough food for themselves and their families.
The year-round aspect of this is easy to figure out. I knit the hats throughout the year, and keep them in a basket until it’s time to give them away. Some of the yarn is leftover from other projects, some is purchased for this purpose and some is donated to me.
I take pleasure in knowing a handful of people will have attractive, warm hats for the cold weather. Some say charitable giving is selfish, because you do it to make yourself feel better. I say, I don’t have to do this to feel good about life and myself. I do it because it’s the right thing to do.
Do you have a talent you share with others in need (whatever that need may be)? I know Judy shares her music and her growth from tragedy with others. Lois shared her kind heart and tough spirit with prisoners until health issues prevented her from doing so. And each month Kathy writes about how to keep the Christmas spirit alive year-round.
Most of you who read this have been given so much, even if it doesn’t always seem that way. For those who are struggling, I pray others reach out to you. I was lucky enough when, during my worst hours, kind people gave me a lift out of the abyss.
This is my thank you.
In honor of a former boyfriend’s birthday, I am telling the true story of the first of his birthdays we spent together, and a follow-up conversation we had after our breakup.
Honor is perhaps not the right word, unless you consider any honesty being honorable. I’m not giving real names.
Dating Dan was a subtle seduction into becoming a verbal punching bag. The smile he initially greeted me with on our dates eventually became a disinterested glance, and I tried desperately to get us back to where we’d been. Until a pan of lasagna forced my eyes open.
It was Dan’s birthday, and I’d promised him the best lasagna he’d ever tasted. All afternoon I labored over boiling and simmering the sauce, cooking up the sausage, slicing the cheese and layering it all between the strips of pasta. I made breadsticks, watching the dough rise and twisting each piece into shape. When the cake cooled, I carefully decorated it. Add a vinaigrette dressing for the salad and a bottle of good wine. I surveyed what I had done, and was satisfied.
He arrived late, as usual, and I silently fretted that the breadsticks were no longer warm and the salad was looking a little limp. Still, my anticipation of his pleasure washed over me.
He took a bite of the lasagna, and grimaced. A few more bites were forced down.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“What is this meat?” he asked.
“Sausage.” Of course.
“Why would you put sausage in lasagna? You’re supposed to use hamburger.”
“Sausage is traditional in Italian cooking.”
“Who told you that? Why did you make this? Why didn’t you just go to the grocery store and buy some from the freezer?”
He continued to berate me and I stood there quietly. I was humiliated. I sought a response, but my mind went blank. Not that it mattered. Any words I could have found to defend myself would have stuck in my throat.
It didn’t stop that night. For the rest of the time we were dating, he never missed an opportunity to bring up the sausage (not hamburger) in the lasagna. Even after we broke up, on the sporadic occasions we saw each other, he continued, until one day it got out of control.
I’d taken care of his cat, Freddy, while he was on a business trip, something I was happy to do since I didn’t yet have a kitty of my own, and Freddy and I were good buds. Dan arrived home early, catching me still at his place, and almost immediately launched into a preposterous lasagna attack.
“Well, I had a free day, so I flew down to North Carolina to visit Tony,” he said, a little too casually.
I was on guard at once. “You had a free day on your business trip to New York, so you caught a flight to North Carolina?”
“Sure.”
“Isn’t that expensive?”
“Not if you travel roundtrip in one day. I got a special fare. It was a discount airline.”
“Really. Who’s Tony?”
“Tony, my best friend from grade school. You’ve heard me talk about him.”
I knew all his friends from grade school, and none of them were named Tony.
“You’ve never mentioned him.”
“Yes, I have. Anyway, I probably never told you this, but Tony’s mom is a real famous chef in Italy. She’s from…” he paused, seeming to search his memory. “Sicily! You know, Sicily.”
“Yes, I know Sicily.”
“Anyway, she’s a real famous chef, she’s like, the Julia Child of Italy.”
“Really.” He didn’t catch the tone.
“Yeah, and she was there when I visited, and I told her…”
“Wait. Did Tony live with his dad or something? I mean, when you were kids.”
“No, he lived with his mom. And dad. Both of them.”
“In Minnesota.”
“Yeah, she took a break to raise him.”
“She took a break from being the Julia Child of Italy to raise her son in the public school system in Minnesota.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, go on.” This was a rare opportunity. Give a man enough rope, and he’ll hang himself.
“So I told her how you’d made the lasagna with sausage, and she couldn’t stop laughing. I mean, for hours. She said that was the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard, using sausage in Italian cooking.”
“The Julia Child of Italy has never heard of using sausage…” I shook my head.
“She couldn’t stop laughing.”
“She lives in North Carolina?”
“No, she lives in Sicily. She was visiting Tony for the weekend.”
“The weekend?”
“The holiday weekend. It’s a holiday in Italy. Freedom Day or something.”
“You visited him the weekend his mother arrived from Italy? During her very short visit with her son?” He nodded. “Okay, go on.”
“She was like a second mother to me.” Chin up, challenging me to contradict him.
“What’s her name?”
“Uh, Maria, I think…but she goes by something else professionally. I forget what. Anyway, she couldn’t stop laughing. She laughed so hard and so long, she didn’t have any time to spend with Tony.”
“Or you, I’m guessing.”
“She didn’t have any time to spend with Tony.” He repeated with emphasis, and paused. “You ruined their weekend together with your lasagna.”
Now it was my turn to laugh, assuming any part of what Dan told me was true and Maria had, indeed, had uncontrollable fits of mirth at my expense. Dan was annoyed, which only made me laugh harder.
A mutual friend filled out the rest of the story for me. A year or so later, Dan starting dating an Italian woman, someone born in the U.S. of — you guessed it — Sicilian parents. She invited him to dinner and (do I need to tell the rest of the story?) when he found out her mother was serving lasagna, he jokingly asked if she’d used sausage, planning to launch into this story about his ignorant former girlfriend.
“Of course,” she replied stiffly, and the conversation went downhill from there. Dan would never tell me any part of the story himself, but I had imagined something just like it for so long, so I was pleased as punch to hear it from our friend.
But the sad thing is, I haven’t made lasagna since that birthday so long ago. And my lasagna was damn good.
Image Credits: (Sicily Sign) gustavofrazao — stock.adobe.com; (Dinner Table) lyudinka — stock.adobe.com; (Italian Cooking stamp) squarelogo — stock.adobe.com; (Chef’s Hat) courtesy of Pixabay; (Airplane) GraphicStock
Today we celebrate my mom’s cat Milton, a sweetheart with a difficult past who found his permanent place of residence a few years ago. Now he’s King of the Castle, reigning with benevolence and charm.
Image Credits–Header: (Cesar Cat) © Belinda Ostrowski; (Paws and Heart) © Bigstockphoto.com
So often I’ve compared a given experience to learning to drive a standard. You know, with the clutch.
Today’s new drivers aren’t as likely to learn to drive this way, since most new cars today are automatic (and have been for a long time). But once upon a time, at least in my neighborhood, if you were a teenager and wanted a car, you took your official driving lessons in an automatic (the school provided lessons once you passed Safety Ed.) and a family member took on the task of teaching you to drive a 5-speed.
You learned because a standard cost about 25 percent less than an automatic. That’s a lot of money with that price tag. Besides, there’s more power in shifting gears. More control. More attitude.
However, it’s a frustrating process. You know what you’re supposed to do, you swear you’re doing it and still it doesn’t work. That’s not the only swearing, typically. Your first teacher gives up after sharing a few choice words and passes the task on to the next unsuspecting volunteer.
Then one day, you get it. It works. You no longer are stopped at a green light, praying you won’t stall again. There’s the occasional slip-up, sure, but you now know how to drive a standard.
Other learning experiences mimic that process. For me, it was math. Particularly algebra. I struggled and struggled until miraculously, the light broke through. Lucky for me, my high school math teacher watched my process and understood why I went from Ds to As, virtually overnight.
I wasn’t so lucky in college, but that’s another story for another day.
I’ve seen men and women take on knitting, something that is second nature to me, and talk themselves through every labored stitch. “I’ll never get it,” they might moan, but I assure them, it will happen. Just keep breaking in those new pathways in the brain.
Driving, calculating, knitting. It takes time, but the battle is part of the joy. By the way, I impressed the heck out of a KFC worker a few years back when I pulled up in my 5-speed Corolla. “I’ve never seen a woman drive a standard,” he marveled. Ah, the passing of time. The needs, and therefore the skills, change.
So whatever you’re learning, stay with it until that breakthrough. Actually, I’m not going to say never give up. There is always a time to move on. Just don’t give up before the process is complete, and your frustration has matured and born fruit.
Image Credits: (Light Bulbs) © Dmitry Guzhanin – stock.adobe.com; (Frustrated Woman) © ivector — stock.adobe.com; (Woman in Car) courtesy of Pixabay.
My World With Words 
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