tuckova

I am (nearly) forty years old and I still rarely make eggs without
getting a teeny bit of shell in there somewhere. My friend says cooking,
for her, is like editing for me: a compulsion. And here I am leaving
grocer’s apostrophes of eggshell all over. Hopeless. This morning for
breakfast I had zucchini and eggs and potatoes; the crisp edges of
properly fried zucchini mask the eggshell, though I think miraculously
this morning I made an omelet without breaking any more egg than was
absolutely necessary. I was
singing while I stirred in the potato: "Any weird you can cook, I can
eat weirder, I can
eat any food weirder than you!" and I’m sure Ethyl Merman rolled over in her
grave, but maybe she was dancing along.

Yesterday, I think it was yesterday, I made rice. "A
scant cup. A scant cup. A cup that is scant. That cup’s scant. That cup
can’t." WHY. Some people talk all the time to prevent their brains from
starting that pesky business of thinking but it’s like I’m treading
water in my brain sometimes to stop myself from floating.

Since I don’t walk Squire to school anymore, I am no longer
terrorizing the neighborhood with my early morning outbursts, standing
in the middle of the sidewalk laughing because I remember something
outrageously funny or chatting myself up in my phony French accent. I’m
sure everybody’s much happier. Nobody needs to see my particular brand of crazy before eight a.m. On Mondays when I go to the high school,
the old ladies on the tram all love me ’cause I give them my seat when
the pig men don’t, and then they (the ladies) always want to talk to me,
with their gold teeth and purple tints and whack makeup. They know
they’ve spotted one of their own in the making. Last week one of them
was nodding at me the whole way home, in other words giving me much
more positive feedback than your average high school senior, and I
wanted to give her my cheery smile but frankly it was all too awful in
my head and I just couldn’t. When she got off the tram she patted my
hand and I realized I was crying. Oh, my old ladies, the mascara is
roping down my cheeks and I am closer than I think.

Last week was entirely too long. If the weekend hadn’t come when it
had, I think drastic action would have been taken. I have high hopes for
this week, though. Not least because the Teletubbie House of Pain video makes me
confident there must be some real good in the world.

subject line from "White Dwarfs", a perfect poem by Michael Ondaatje.