I'm eating for two now
We say this of the pregnant. We also say it of ourselves when we're eating a good amount and want to joke about ourselves as being pregnant, because only a pregnancy could reasonably account for a heaped plate of grilled victuals and sides that reaches a vertical height of let's be modest and say 4 inches, the rest of the food spilling around that 4-inch-high apex like the mashed potato mountain Richard Dreyfuss built in Close Encounters. I've had reason to think about food and drink over the last few days because there's been so much food, good food, available here in the family's home in Camillus, and at Tasha & Brian's house in Williamson, and at the wedding of my cousin Liz and new cousin-in-law Chris -
!!! INTERRUPTION !!!
Last night at about 6:45 on the last day of the year that was, Elizabeth and Christopher were wed in a ceremony that was as lovely as the recessional song - Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash singing, I believe, about going to Jackson - was unexpectedly fitting. I here offer my profound good wishes to them and picture them now and will continue to picture them in the following way: Liz up in Chris's arms, having leapt there, Chris's face red from smiling at the professions of love and gratitude Liz's just read aloud to everyone present. Hearty, hearty congratulations to you both!
!!! RESUMPTION !!!
- good food every which way including loose. Holidays are defined by the variety of foods available and overindulged in, but this holiday season's been more bound up in food and drink than others, and I think I know why. Just this afternoon, for instance, Kris and I arrived back from Tasha & Brian's house, where we were staying such that we'd have easy access to the Rochester environs for New Year & wedding activities. Tasha and Brian, unsurprisingly when you think about it, are consummate entertainers and hosts: generous with their wine, their Scotch, their pets, and their company. This very enjoyable 3 days and 2 nights stay in Williamson was defined by good eats, one highlight of which was the meal we shared the first night in town: pan-seared tenderloin steaks, mashed potatoes, grilled vegetables (or possibly sauteed - certain details seem hazy from this distant vantage), burgundy, icewine, Glenfiddich, peppermint bark, which while storebought has come to define for me the taste of holiday desserts. One result of this incredible meal and the post-prandial drinks was that I developed the longest, most painful case of hiccups I have ever had the misfortune to endure and be laughed at about. Each hiccup felt like the moment in Alien when the Dustin Hoffman-looking guy, Victim #1, is at dinner with the rest of the Nostromo crew and the chestburster that's been laid in his stomach first begins to punch out of his solar plexus region, and you the theater-going audience member realize all at once, coincident with the rest of the crew, that he is not OK, and that some bad shit is going down. They were the kind of hiccups that to even remember them makes me want to italicize everything to convey their horrible scope.
Another result though of this meal was to get me thinking about food and meals as something that we come together around. It has a similar social role as fires do, or television. You come together and you eat. Pictures of Jon at his happiest tend to have him at the dinner table, beaming down at or at the camera over a plate of steaming lobster or a bowl of clams. It has been occurring to me since this meal that there is a huge amount of food that Jon won't be around to eat anymore. This sounds silly. It wasn't silly when it crystallized in my head.
Here, let's try this: in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, one of the main protagonists - 17-yr-old tennis prodigy and low-level genius Hal Incandenza - sometimes goes into cataleptic statis / shock as a result of seeing, in his mind, laid out before him in an impossibly big room, everything he's taken into his body and everything he's expelled from his body. For Hal, the very idea of existing means continuing the previous 17 years of eating and defecating and drinking and urinating, means adding another 60+ years of food, drink, shit and piss to this visionary room of All Things Hal. Because Hal sees these quantities in sum rather than in the piecemeal day-by-day accumulations the average functioning human being sees and partakes of, Hal begins to go a little bonkers.
This thematic problem of Viewing In Sum is solved - in Infinite Jest anyway - by another protagonist, the 29-year-old Don Gately, who's in medical traction for reasons way too complex to even summarize. Don Gately's been a longtime member of AA for a previous drug abuse, and much of Infinite Jest is about AA's funny operations in terms of winning AAers' faith and how AA's proscriptions and quasi-cult-like belief systems and activities and attitudes really do help its members endure the day-in, day-out hardships of getting along with and through addiction. Toward the end of the novel, Don Gately has a modest (modest to him, but momentous for the reader) revelation about abiding with hardship by breaking it down into constituent parts. Only in so breaking down the hardship - the impression of an apparently-infinite amount of eating, drinking, and shitting; the seconds and minutes and hours of, say, a bodily pain through which one must push - can a person get by. Getting by is a process of establishing and maintaining a view of life as consisting of small, manageable increments.
What am I saying here.
When I sit down to eat at one or another of these holiday meals we've had over the past few days I find myself thinking of Jon not only because he isn't around, not only because of the social role food has for all of us. After all, Jon had long since moved into the basement before moving out to Colorado, and even before that the family had left off doing the nightly All Around the Table thing: college and work and fatigue kept us from keeping that particular tradition, and I think most families at a similar stage of development have something similar happen to them. So that's not why I think of Jon. Instead, I find myself thinking of him because there was always a huge amount of food and drink that Jon would singlehandedly consume and now won't. The family has been going through milk at the abysmally slow rate of 1 Gal / week. Jon used to fill a 2 liter Tupperware pitcher 3/4 of the way full with milk, and take it down into the basement, and re-emerge later that day or night with the milk gone. I have this somewhat conflicted relationship with food - while I love it, I also feel as though I should always maintain the same asceticism towards it that I display toward my time and my diligence with respect to keeping schedule defined by writerly and athletic-type activities - and now that Jon isn't around, I feel as though someone has to eat Jon's always considerable portion. And that that person's me, or one of us. I suppose this notion of compensatory eating goes a long way toward explaining the neighborly tradition of bringing over dishes of baked and fried natures.
Speaking of neighbors, I can't begin to thank ours enough. They were & are literally incredible in terms of aiding with the post-wake familial gathering. I can't say enough about it now; it will have to wait for the morning.
!!! INTERRUPTION !!!
Last night at about 6:45 on the last day of the year that was, Elizabeth and Christopher were wed in a ceremony that was as lovely as the recessional song - Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash singing, I believe, about going to Jackson - was unexpectedly fitting. I here offer my profound good wishes to them and picture them now and will continue to picture them in the following way: Liz up in Chris's arms, having leapt there, Chris's face red from smiling at the professions of love and gratitude Liz's just read aloud to everyone present. Hearty, hearty congratulations to you both!
!!! RESUMPTION !!!
- good food every which way including loose. Holidays are defined by the variety of foods available and overindulged in, but this holiday season's been more bound up in food and drink than others, and I think I know why. Just this afternoon, for instance, Kris and I arrived back from Tasha & Brian's house, where we were staying such that we'd have easy access to the Rochester environs for New Year & wedding activities. Tasha and Brian, unsurprisingly when you think about it, are consummate entertainers and hosts: generous with their wine, their Scotch, their pets, and their company. This very enjoyable 3 days and 2 nights stay in Williamson was defined by good eats, one highlight of which was the meal we shared the first night in town: pan-seared tenderloin steaks, mashed potatoes, grilled vegetables (or possibly sauteed - certain details seem hazy from this distant vantage), burgundy, icewine, Glenfiddich, peppermint bark, which while storebought has come to define for me the taste of holiday desserts. One result of this incredible meal and the post-prandial drinks was that I developed the longest, most painful case of hiccups I have ever had the misfortune to endure and be laughed at about. Each hiccup felt like the moment in Alien when the Dustin Hoffman-looking guy, Victim #1, is at dinner with the rest of the Nostromo crew and the chestburster that's been laid in his stomach first begins to punch out of his solar plexus region, and you the theater-going audience member realize all at once, coincident with the rest of the crew, that he is not OK, and that some bad shit is going down. They were the kind of hiccups that to even remember them makes me want to italicize everything to convey their horrible scope.
Another result though of this meal was to get me thinking about food and meals as something that we come together around. It has a similar social role as fires do, or television. You come together and you eat. Pictures of Jon at his happiest tend to have him at the dinner table, beaming down at or at the camera over a plate of steaming lobster or a bowl of clams. It has been occurring to me since this meal that there is a huge amount of food that Jon won't be around to eat anymore. This sounds silly. It wasn't silly when it crystallized in my head.
Here, let's try this: in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, one of the main protagonists - 17-yr-old tennis prodigy and low-level genius Hal Incandenza - sometimes goes into cataleptic statis / shock as a result of seeing, in his mind, laid out before him in an impossibly big room, everything he's taken into his body and everything he's expelled from his body. For Hal, the very idea of existing means continuing the previous 17 years of eating and defecating and drinking and urinating, means adding another 60+ years of food, drink, shit and piss to this visionary room of All Things Hal. Because Hal sees these quantities in sum rather than in the piecemeal day-by-day accumulations the average functioning human being sees and partakes of, Hal begins to go a little bonkers.
This thematic problem of Viewing In Sum is solved - in Infinite Jest anyway - by another protagonist, the 29-year-old Don Gately, who's in medical traction for reasons way too complex to even summarize. Don Gately's been a longtime member of AA for a previous drug abuse, and much of Infinite Jest is about AA's funny operations in terms of winning AAers' faith and how AA's proscriptions and quasi-cult-like belief systems and activities and attitudes really do help its members endure the day-in, day-out hardships of getting along with and through addiction. Toward the end of the novel, Don Gately has a modest (modest to him, but momentous for the reader) revelation about abiding with hardship by breaking it down into constituent parts. Only in so breaking down the hardship - the impression of an apparently-infinite amount of eating, drinking, and shitting; the seconds and minutes and hours of, say, a bodily pain through which one must push - can a person get by. Getting by is a process of establishing and maintaining a view of life as consisting of small, manageable increments.
What am I saying here.
When I sit down to eat at one or another of these holiday meals we've had over the past few days I find myself thinking of Jon not only because he isn't around, not only because of the social role food has for all of us. After all, Jon had long since moved into the basement before moving out to Colorado, and even before that the family had left off doing the nightly All Around the Table thing: college and work and fatigue kept us from keeping that particular tradition, and I think most families at a similar stage of development have something similar happen to them. So that's not why I think of Jon. Instead, I find myself thinking of him because there was always a huge amount of food and drink that Jon would singlehandedly consume and now won't. The family has been going through milk at the abysmally slow rate of 1 Gal / week. Jon used to fill a 2 liter Tupperware pitcher 3/4 of the way full with milk, and take it down into the basement, and re-emerge later that day or night with the milk gone. I have this somewhat conflicted relationship with food - while I love it, I also feel as though I should always maintain the same asceticism towards it that I display toward my time and my diligence with respect to keeping schedule defined by writerly and athletic-type activities - and now that Jon isn't around, I feel as though someone has to eat Jon's always considerable portion. And that that person's me, or one of us. I suppose this notion of compensatory eating goes a long way toward explaining the neighborly tradition of bringing over dishes of baked and fried natures.
Speaking of neighbors, I can't begin to thank ours enough. They were & are literally incredible in terms of aiding with the post-wake familial gathering. I can't say enough about it now; it will have to wait for the morning.
posted by Wil at
2:57 PM
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