Category Archive

I love food.  Love.  I’m not really a cook, though I enjoy it, and though I’m not really a gourmet, I can pretend.  I think about food all the time, and it’s not uncommon for me to use thoughts of my pending dinner to get me through the day. 

I’ve always been a food girl, since the time I was small.  I often won’t remember parties or plane rides or meetings until I’m reminded of what we ate.  My mom first realized it, she says, when my sister and I were watching Parent Trap for the first time.  The old Haley Mills version; not the pre-trainwreck Linday Lohan update (though that was, I thought, pretty cute, too).  It was right at the part where the girls, away at camp, realize that they’re long lost sisters, just as the lunch bell rings. Mom notices us both going teary-eyed.  My sister: “it’s so sad, they both have the same mommy and they didn’t know!”  Me: “they’re going to miss lunch!”  She still gets a kick out of telling that story, my mom.

On the train ride home on this will-not-end Wednesday and en route to dinner with a friend, I found myself pressed against the bony shoulder of an obviously anorexic girl who was, I was horrified to read over her shoulder, devouring a diet book.  A diet book.  This girl with arms of a starving African and a spine puncturing angry scabs in her emaciated back was reading a chapter entitled “maintenance”; was studying a chart called “controlling the cravings”; was reading lists of “danger” foods. It was crowded.  I was curious.  What can I say.

Looking back on it now, my first thoughts are of the “how could she do that?” variety.  Not the starving, per se, but rather the consciously reading about food while starving.  I’m reading a fantastic book now—Julie and Julia, about a woman courageously working her way through Julia Child’s French cookbook (and blogging about it, before blogs were even big)—and seriously, just reading about someone else’s dinners, failed or not, makes me hungry.  I’m the only person I know who reads the “fit” portion of Tuesday’s Express with a big plate of snacks, inspired mostly by the portion on eating healthy. The power of persuasion and I, we go way back.

But my mind was elsewhere while gripping that handrail.  Sadness; sadness was really my only feeling.  Sadness and sorrow. “Doesn’t someone love you? Isn’t there someone to tell you to stop, to destroy that book, to get you help and to force-feed you a nice steak?” If she saw my judging glances, the trying-to-take-you-in, no-I’m-not-really-staring stares, her illness would have contorted them, and twisted them, and turned them into “oh god, she thinks I’m so fat.”  She was dying, right there on the blue line to Franconia-Springfield.  Dying alone.  And I don’t think there was anything I could have done. 

Someone should love her more.  It should probably start with her.  But someone, somewhere, should love her more.  

Here is what I know about Lucille. 

She was born on a farm in Oklahoma smack in the middle of August, a birthday she would share with my mom some 40 years later.  Having spent many of my childhood August days in Oklahoma, I can imagine pretty well what it must have been like.  The ground would have been cracking in the heat, but there probably would have been a whisper of a breeze.  Just enough to creak some hinges, rustle some leaves, and tickle some of the grass fields. There wouldn’t have been any clouds, and the sun would seem to be pulsing in the sky.  The farm buildings would have had blurred edges, would have wavered in the distance: an illusion popular with heat rays the world over.

The furthest she went in school was the 8th grade.  I imagine her school to have been one of those all-grades-in-one-room situations.  This was Depression-era Henryetta, Oklahoma, after all.  I bet she was really smart. 

She was married after she graduated.  She was 14; her husband was 25.  This is where my ability to realistically imagine ceases; I have no place to start wondering what that must have been like.  I was still firmly a kid after 8th grade, running around in purple overalls and colored scrunchies. (My mom’s meticulously chronicled photo albums tragically capture the bad right alongside the really good, much to my well-vocalized chagrin). I hadn’t even gotten my period yet, and was certainly in no position to run a farmhouse.  She did it, though; I don’t know how she felt, whether she was happy, what she thought about as she tended the farm, the kitchen, the husband.  I don’t know if it’s what she wanted at all.

She had her first child when she was 15; a daughter.  Two more daughters came next in quick succession; no more children after that.  I wonder, actually, if his didn’t have something to do with having no sons.  On a farm, wouldn’t male labor be more prized?  I wonder if she was happy, or if she felt ashamed.  I wonder if her husband was a good dad; if he was around; if he raised those girls or if she did. 

I used to sit on her lap as a kid, and she crocheted dresses for my barbies. She made some of the kitchen towels in my apartment. She sent a Christmas card every year, something very religious and meaningful.

She was part Cherokee, I don’t know quite how much.  They say that blood is why I have such high cheekbones.

She was my great-grandma, and my dad went to her funeral today.  The sadness I feel is mostly this: I really didn’t know her at all.  

I never knew you, and a lot of what I knew of you, in all honesty, I thought was unglamorous and unimpressive. My second-hand knowledge of your policies, my hearsay observances of life in your high school, did not cast you in the best light.

You died today. “Shocking and unexpected,” they said in my generic alumna e-mail announcement, no doubt penned frantically in an office with PR in mind.

At 45, were you ready? There was more for you to see, and more for you to do, of course; but were you at peace? Did you leave knowing that you’d done all you could, that you’d maximized the days allotted? Do any of us?

I am so sorry that I first assumed that the e-mail was a tasteless prank. I am so sorry that my first thoughts on reading the subject were “yeah, right,” with a chuckle.

Today I will live life, and I will be in it. Thank you for being in my story, even if on the fringes, and for giving this day-to-day thing your best shot. The words will, from here, keep flowing; but you are not forgotten.