Tag Archives: marriage

“I Eyed her Risotto Speculatively…”

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Wendy and I tend to share cooking duties, swapping back and forth as other responsibilities allow. Actually, when we first met I was mightily impressed with the lasagna she served, thinking this must be the pinnacle of a vast mountain of culinary expertise.

Alas, I subsequently discovered, too late, that said “pinnacle” was pretty much the whole mountain.

A further complication to our shared cooking duties is that I tend towards spicy food. I love Indian curries for instance, whereas Wendy runs from anything spicy as fast as she can, considering cinnamon hot. This often means that we have to find ways of producing two entirely different dishes simultaneously to suit our different preferences. Such are the fancy steps of the dance called marriage!

Just recently I contracted some kind of stomach bug and had a couple days when I wasn’t eating very much at all as it worked its way (pretty much literally) through my system. Wendy followed on by going down with the same thing a few days later–but we didn’t realize it until a critical moment.

At the point where I was feeling much better, and fairly hungry, it was my turn to cook. Being tight for time, I prepared a nice crock pot risotto, very non-spicy for Wendy with a spicy side-sauce for me. Setting the dishes out on one of our porch tables, we settled down to an amiable al fresco dining experience that would include sharing our stories of the day. It had been for both of us a stressful day in a stressful week; the Celtic festival was bearing down on us, Wendy was working hard on a critical juncture for her second book, and we were in the middle of plans to open our upstairs cafe for October, with a workman installing heat and air in the new dining room even as we sat down to dinner. Oh, and they’re about to start filming a movie in our town and some people were scouting locations in our shop. Difficult week.

Wendy took a few mouthfuls of risotto and paused, then sat very quietly as I wittered on – then she got up, went down to the far end of the porch, leaned over the rail, and puked. Coming back she sat quietly again, then got up and went to the rail again as I continued to eat – I was hungry after all! Besides, I knew she wasn’t dying. I’d had it the week before.

As Wendy’s greenish-grey pallor deepened, and she continued to sit VERY quietly, I eyed her risotto speculatively. When she got up a third time, I reached over and retrieved her plate. As she returned, with my fork I wordlessly indicated that I’d be happy to polish off hers as well. She signed that she would have no objection. And continued to sit quietly, waiting for the next wave.

We wondered afterwards how many people observed the whole pantomime and quite what they would make of it. But you know, around here, crazy is the new normal.

Wendy is fully recovered,  but she has gone off rice-based dishes for some reason. And yes, I am a heartless bastard. But the risotto was excellent.

“Dear John…”

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At the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul, Jack and I looked at clay tablets bearing letters from 1200 or so BC, and gravestones from sometime between then and 300 BC.

There is nothing new under the sun. One letter informed a man that the woman writing it was marrying “the farmer” instead of him. One stipulated that the wages for performing an exorcism were two sheep: one male, one female. Another extolled the virtues of Hypodia’s parties and invited the recipient to one. A gravestone erected by one Olympios suggested that, although he died a civil servant, he SHOULD have been elected provincial leader, and would have been had it not been for the jealousy of others, and he hoped the guy who’d gotten it rotted in hell. Hades, actually, but you get the point.

There is nothing new under the sun. From the time we’ve been able to write, we’ve focused on just a few things. People want love. We want a life that we feel fulfills the talents we believe ourselves to posses.  And we want good stories.

Beside the gravestones–some of them very sweet and touching, actually, like the one from the woman who said she was “weeping, wailing, and mourning for her dear departed”–each sarcophagus in the museum had a tale told in figures around it: Psyche and Eros; how Apollo got married; the death of some guy I’d never heard of in a drunken brawl.

Then and now, 2000 BC or AD or whatever system you use, there is nothing new under the sun. The names change from Mahmud to Matthew, the hats morph from turbans to ball caps, and the women’s dresses get shorter or longer, but we people go on, chasing love, money, and a good job. And telling stories about ourselves and each other.

Kinda reassuring, ain’t it? Although I think exorcisms cost more like twelve sheep now.