It’s Sunday night again. Parker is dancing through the house belting along to the Original Broadway RENT Soundtrack. She’s made us fancy cocktails — raspberry whiskey egg white sours, which is just like a regular whiskey egg white sour except she used the leftover raspberry syrup from some berries I canned last summer and opened last week instead of regular simple syrup, which turns the beverage a beautiful rosy shade of pink and adds a subtle berry flavor — and now she’s waiting for me to finish blogging so we can play some games. I’ve convinced her to play a round of Bananagrams with me, even though it’s her least favorite game (and of course, my absolute favorite) and then we’ll play something else, maybe Wingspan, maybe something brand new.
When she asked what she should do with the egg yolks she was separating from the egg whites for our drinks, I got the idea to make a Caesar salad. I somehow have yet to make her my perfect Caesar dressing (which is, in truth, simply Samin Nosrat’s perfect Caesar dressing) so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Making the dressing is meditative. I almost always break the mayo on the first try, so then I use Samin’s trick of adding half a teaspoon of the warmest water your tap can manage to a brand new bowl and adding the sad broken mayo drop by drop to this new situation, whisking like your life depends on it, and I have to say, rescuing a broken mayo feels even more godly than making a successful mayo on the first try. I like the layering of it all, the adding salt and acid over and over until it’s perfect. I ripped up the very end of our challah loaf from Friday night and toasted the bread pieces to make fresh croutons. We didn’t have any Romaine lettuce so I made do with a spinach mix Parker bought for some of our other meals this week. Our greens are the one thing we often let go bad by the end of the week, but tonight we devoured them. “This week we finished our greens!” I cheered. “If you make this dressing every week we will always finish our greens,” Parker enthused. She liked the salad, incase that’s not obvious. She made herself a second helping.
Making Caesar salad always reminds me of my friend T Kira Madden, because she has written about its connection to her dad so much. T Kira is one of the first people I texted when my dad died, because I knew she would understand. I like that through the act of writing, I can know something about T Kira’s dad and her relationship with him. Not to be corny, but her words, her telling, keep him going, keep him of this earth. I wonder which words I’ve written about my dad keep him going. I wrote a new essay about him this morning, the one I’ve been hinting at, about religion and synagogue, and it made me feel very close to him. I burst into tears while writing it, of course — not like, the cute kind of crying that sometimes happens when a memory flits into my head or I say something silly with his intonation but like, the sobs that shake your entire skeleton, that jangle your teeth inside your head. I have not felt him in the room with me so deeply in ages; possibly not ever. Why did this particular essay call him forth? How many times do we have to try to say the thing until we get it right? I would give anything to make my dad this Caesar salad, the one I learned to make the summer I lived with him and my mom during the first terrible year of the pandemic, one more time. We didn’t even have a particularly special relationship to this salad together — it’s just something I made that he liked. I wish my dad was still alive and I could do more nice things for him, infinite nice things for him, until he died. I wish “until he died” was still a phrase that made sense when talking about my dad.
I had set aside the whole day to write the essay about my dad and Judaism, because I thought it would take forever, but the opposite happened, it unfolded swiftly, flew right out of me, the way that sometimes writing just does. So by the time Rihanna was ready to sing at the halftime show I was all done writing. There is more I could do, of course, but Parker urges me to relax because it’s Sunday night, and so I resolve to try. I think one of the things I’m learning about myself is I feel like I relax way too much, but Parker says I actually never relax? I told her I felt like I relaxed a lot today because I stayed in bed until 10:30am figuring out Spelling Bee (“no,” she says, “that’s just the time you wake up on a weekend”) and then because I decided to make an elaborate dinner (“that’s not relaxing,” she says, “that’s cooking”) and also I spent like ten minutes playing this dumb game I really like on my phone called Woodoku while I pooped (at which point she looks at me like I am truly insane and says very gently, like you might say to a small frightened squirrel, “honey that’s not relaxing, that’s pooping”). She reflected back to me that not only does it seem like I think I’m relaxing all the time when in fact I’m not, but it also seems like maybe I think there’s something bad about relaxing, like I don’t deserve it for some reason. “I think everyone else should relax!” I tell her quickly, lest she think I’m judging her, because that’s not my intention. “But uh… I dunno, if I’m not revising my book right now, it sort of feels like I should be doing something productive, don’t you think? Like planning the wedding, or unpacking my office? Or getting ahead on emails for the work week!” She shakes her head. “No,” she says simply. “You should be relaxing. Everyone needs to relax.”
So I’m going to sign off now and go relax. Or at least I’m going to try. What myth about yourself do you believe that might be better if it was undone?
Writing & Reading Updates:
My Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute Creative Nonfiction Workshop starts on Wednesday and is SOLD OUT, but there are still a couple of spots left in my Instant Feedback Workshop! I’ll be announcing new classes for the summer soon, and have room in my schedule to take on a few more private lessons with students — if this is of interest, shoot me an email and we’ll discuss!
I have at least one reading planned for AWP and will post details when I have them. I’m also open to being added to panels and additional readings at the conference, so if you need someone to talk about writing sex or grief, working at an independent queer media publication, or anything related to dykes and literature, I’m your girl!
I will be reading at Incite: Queer Writers Read in Portland on March 22 at 7pm. Details to come, but save the date for now. <3