Mental Gymnastics, and Almond-Plum Cobbler for Your 6-inch Skillet

When you live alone, there are few kitchen tools as satisfying as a 6-inch cast-iron skillet. It gives power of purpose, and even a bit of flair, to your meals. You can use it to make a fritatta (relishing its oven-safe qualities), fry a sensible serving of hash browns, sauté a couple slabs of tofu or whatever vegetables you please, make non-acidic sauces, and a zillion other meals and dishes. Whatever you cook, carry it proudly to the table, using one gloved hand for the skillet, and the other for your silverware and a glass of wine.

Lately I’ve had more occasions for the 6-inch skillet, since one event in this summer of relative turmoil was a disappointing breakup. That bookended the last part of the summer, while the beginning was kicked off by my dad’s remarriage, and a new family layout that includes a stepmom and stepsiblings. This latter event should have been simple and made perfect sense—a quick checkmark on the to-do list of the summer—except that it was unexpectedly difficult for reasons I can’t totally understand yet.

Then somewhere in there began my first real friendship-threatening conflict with an old friend. It resulted, recently, to my great relief, in dealing and confronting and communicating in a responsible way—such as, talking about things and saying what we mean. Unbelievable how well that works! Even though I've been in therapy for __ years and I know this is the responsible way to handle human affairs, it's historically not my style. If things aren't working, I'll just let it fizzle out and save the worry for later.

In one of my emails to this friend I used the phrase "mental gymnastics": the acquired ability to recognize, say, discomfort or resentment, and be able to both acknowledge its presence and also find a way around it so that it doesn't have a stronghold on unrelated aspects of one's life. The technical word for mental gymnastics is probably "compartmentalization," and whatever the popular opinion about compartmentalizing, working through vs around, and my ability to "save the worry for later," I still think mental gymnastics have a time and place.

So in light of mental gymnastics, I’m not feeling too badly about things at the moment. Consider yourself lucky that none of my previous attempts at writing this post ever went up. And among the relatively crappy stuff that’s transpired, there's some good stuff, too. My second book goes on sale sometime this week, and I’m pretty proud of it. And, I'm paying the rent and putting food on the table! So yep, I'm done complaining.

Leading into the fall it’s been wonderful to exercise and cook freely, to enjoy stints of sobriety, to reconnect with people I’d lost touch with and/or been on bad terms with, to bleach my hair white on impulse, to grab hold of this opportunity to take myself extremely seriously. (Folks, I bought a journal that I can sometimes be seen writing in, in public.) I’ve never been more willing to go see your band perform, or join you at a poorly attended reading, or head to an out-of-the-way housewarming party, or show up at your birthday party even if I don't know you that well. Invite me and I'll probably come. And I haven’t been Debbie Downer about it—I’m not so unfun to be around after all!

But most of all this has been a perfect opportunity to enjoy the privilege and pleasures of living alone.

Cooking for one is kind of an art, one that I’ve not perfected quite yet. (I'm working on it.) I usually take the route of making a standard yield and then packing up the leftovers. And for sure that’s a good way to cook economically, but sometimes I find that either I can eat three portions of food because it’s there and it tastes good, or the leftovers go to waste because the responsibility of eating them is too much to bear. So there’s real skill in making a one-serving meal that’s not scrambled eggs or a sandwich. Right now the approach seems to be to seek out cute little one-serving casseroles and the aforementioned 6-inch cast-iron skillet and then jerry-rig your recipes to accommodate these smaller dishes.

But for dessert, this is one answer and a terrific excuse to luxuriate in cooking for one: a generously portioned fruit cobbler that has a terrific tender/chewy texture and a lot of fragrance, the kind of goopy fall dessert I crave in the summer when it’s too hot to bake. It’s relatively easy, but not so easy that you can just wing it halfheartedly. This dessert requires some work and commitment—a few extra dirty dishes, a coffee grinder to clean, some steps that don't feel entirely streamlined—but it's an effort that always pays off, for me at least. What is good food, if not a buffer you can consistently rely on?

Almond-Plum Cobbler for Your Six-Inch Skillet
Adapted from Martha Stewart

Serves 1 very generously, or 2 sensibly

15 roasted or toasted almonds
2 tablespoons butter
1/3 cup flour
1/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons milk
1 tablespoon beaten egg (apologies, there's no way around this obnoxious detail)
1 teaspoon brandy
4 plums, pitted and sliced into 3/4-inch-thick wedges (about 8 ounces)
Squeeze of lemon juice

1. Preheat the oven to 375° F. Melt the butter in a 6-inch cast-iron skillet over low heat and let cool slightly.

2. Finely grind the almonds in a spice/coffee grinder. Combine with the flour, 1/4 cup sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon in a mixing bowl, whisking to combine.

3. Whisk together the milk, egg, and brandy in a separate bowl, then pour in all but a small puddle of the melted butter—leave just enough butter in the skillet to generously coat it—whisking again to combine. Stir in the dry mixture until just combined. Pour into the skillet.

4. Stir together the plums, remaining 3 tablespoons sugar, lemon juice, and a pinch of salt (you can use the bowl the dry ingredients had been in). Scoop the fruit into the skillet, spreading the plum slices evenly into the batter using your fingers.

5. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean and the center is set. If the surface starts to get too brown, cover with foil. Let cool for at least 30 or 40 minutes before serving.

Shortbread Cookies for the Next Flood

If you were on the East coast bracing for Irene, especially in New York, you may have been bored and antsy because you didn’t know what you were supposed to be doing. I was. After I assembled my "Go Pack" and identified and protected my valuables, I was stuck refreshing my Twitter feed and the NYT homepage, where honestly, the news never fully developed in a way that merited my mania. I tried to busy myself with little tasks, but I lacked focus.

But at some point I watched a video for how to make Stupidly Simple Shortbread, and that provided power of purpose for about 30 minutes. I'm not much of a shortbread person—dry, dense textures aren't my thing, and butter isn't really my flavor. But these shortbread cookies came out perfect. They're crisp and light but not super delicate.

I took some liberties with the recipe, drawing mostly from a tip I read in the cute little cookbook Simply Perfect Every Time—that of adding rice flour for a bit of texture—and then wanted to go for a sweet-salty thing by sprinkling the sliced cookies with both sugar and Kosher salt. I made them with the idea that they'd keep well through the flood, but we ate them all before the heavy rain even arrived.

Shortbread Cookies

1 cup flour
1/4 cup rice flour
1/4 teaspoon Kosher salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Stir together the flours and salt in a small bowl. Cream the butter and sugar in a standing mixer, until fluffy, about a minute or two at medium speed. Add the extract, and then the flour all at once. Stir, on the mixer’s lowest speed, until JUST combined. Transfer the dough onto a sheet of plastic wrap and roll it in a log. Place it in the freezer for 10 to 15 minutes, or the refrigerator for 45 to 60. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Slice the log into uniformly thick cookies and arrange them on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Using the tines of a fork or a paring knife, make creatitive little stripes on the top. Then sprinkle each one with sugar and a pinch of Kosher salt. Bake for 15 minutes, until just golden on the edges and golden brown on the bottoms. Cool completely on the baking sheets.

Circle in the sand

This is something that happened last night. I went to see Rickie Lee Jones—who, as anyone who knows me knows is an artist I’m mildly obsessed with—at City Winery. I made the decision at the last minute. Tickets were expensive and City Winery hasn’t ever struck me as a very interesting venue. But biting the bullet and handing over a credit card number for a ticket at City Winery is just what you do when you're a fan.

Jones came out after we’d been waiting for a while, and without much fanfare. I just looked up and there she was, in a bowler hat and fingerless, striped gloves that went halfway up her forearms. She fumbled with her guitar for a second, and then set it down and started “Easy Money” acapella. Her band trickled out, joining in with her in a seemingly spontaneous way. It was fun. She sounded fantastic, as she always does. Then the song ended and there was a lot more fumbling—with the guitar, with the tuner; the technician was summoned, something was wrong. Jones was talking with the technician while at the same time introducing the show, all in her characteristic stream-of-consciousness mumble. This is what she does when she performs, or at least in the several times I’ve seen her shows: free verse ramblings interspersed with songs.

We had been waiting for the show to start for a while, and she didn’t seem to be making a public effort to kick it into motion. While we were all a little annoyed, the consensus seemed to be that we were eager to forgive our idol and wanted the show to start. But then the most annoyed and least idolizing audience member, in a moment of Jones’ fumbling silence, said out loud, “This is what we get after waiting for an hour?” Jones snapped: “Yes, this is what you get. Fuck you. You think because I’m standing up here on a stage you can be rude to me? I’ll pay for your fucking dinner and you can leave. Fuck you.” (This is an approximation, but you get the jist.) Then there was more finagling with cords and guitars, and Jones announced she’d be leaving the stage in order to get everything fixed, and in the meantime she wanted the woman who’d spoken up to be escorted out.

And that’s what happened. (It was the most unexpected husband and wife—an older couple in comfortable shoes! I’d noticed them when they entered and thought how when I get old that’s what I’ll look like.) They were escorted out, but not before Jones returned to the stage. The husband threw out a few fuck you’s at Jones before finally leaving, and then the show went on.

(The show was great, even if it had an understandably strange vibe. She performed her first two albums in their entirety, but in the order that she wrote the songs.)

I’ve never witnessed anything like this before. I'd heard and read that Jones—and this is something about her that I’ve always found appealing—is unrepentant when it comes to this kind of incident. She later said, “It’s going to take some time for me to heal from that old bitch,” and people cheered and shouted out lots of compliments. We all agreed: the woman who'd left was undoubtedly rude, she probably shouldn’t have been there, we were glad when she was gone. But there remained a tinge of uneasiness. Surely this was not the most gracious way to handle the situation.


But my ticket said that show time was 8:00. I overheard a server saying later that Jones would go on at 8:30. Then the show didn’t start until 9:15. My ticket—the cheapest option, with an obstructed view—was $60, not including X glasses of fine (as in, OK) wine. Shows always start late, fans are quick to forgive, even at pricy shows, nothing new here. But now I'm wondering, are we getting our information from two different databases? Is this plain revisionist history? It’s hard for even a rabid fan like me to not get irritated at a tweet like this.

This reminded me of the last Cassandra Wilson show I saw (you know, too, that Cassandra Wilson is my other favorite). This was at a similarly problematic venue, Blue Note Jazz Club. At some point during the first or second song, Wilson extended her arm, pointed out her index finger, and, circling around, scanned the full audience before zeroing in on some poor viewer who was trying to film her with a digital video recorder. She stood there pointing, saying something like “Gotcha! Right there—that one!” as she ordered a Blue Note staff member to confiscate the camera. It was a scene, it was the behavior of a diva, and it annoyed me a lot. Sure, it’s not permitted to record these shows (though, what’s going to happen? Another shaky YouTube video that only a rabid fan like me is ever going to watch?), but, once again, is this the most gracious way to handle the situation? It seems to me that recording a live show is a act of affection, and publicly humiliating a fan isn't productive for anyone involved.

So two things: a fan buys a ticket to a show and it is a gesture of respect, and whoever’s name is on the ticket stub is the recipient of that respect. Maybe I am getting old and turning into a Republican (just kidding!), but it seems that that respect should to be nurtured and returned to those who facilitate it. That’s part of what an audience expects, even if there are some exceedingly annoying, poorly behaved ticket holders ones out there. Saying fuck you to even a demeaning, rude, and probably misplaced audience member violates the balance of respect. There must be other ways to make the point without going there.

The other is something my Grandpa told me a while ago, right after I’d moved here and was going on about how in New York I’ve come into contact with all the writers and artists I love—people such as Cassandra Wilson, who I saw in concert not one month after the move. He said, “Yeah, but soon enough you realize they’re all just people, too.” I really didn’t want to believe him then and I scoffed when he said it. But I suppose it's time to come around.

Weighing in

I woke up this morning, showered, and stepped outside feeling anew: I am a gay man who can get married [here]! As I started thinking through my morning errands, I braced myself to register the change. But things looked and felt pretty much the same. I was getting sweaty, I regretted not wearing shorts. A cyclist almost ran me over. Someone I kind of know was standing in front of his apartment, so I feigned blindness in order to not have to talk to him. Alright, cool, I concluded. I don't have plans to get married anytime soon, so I bought an iced coffee and proceeded with the rest of the day.

Obviously, marriage is never going to be the vehicle for serious radical change. But marriage equality definitely is something, a note of clarity among all the noise of the straight-gay chasm—even if the effort to dismantle constrictive social norms inherent in institutions such as marriage never soon sees the light of day.

But what is the big deal? Why is it taking so long and generating so much angst? For the one millionth time, I expressed this frustration to Matt while we were eating dinner. At this point the vote was still about to happen and I was constantly refreshing my Twitter feed, amazed at how invested in the whole thing I'd become. I'd vowed earlier in the evening that if I couldn't pop the champagne later that night, I'd be cracking the bottle over the curb and taking to the streets.

Matt was in Massachusetts when they legalized gay marriage under Mitt Romney, and he told me that once it passed, the change was hardly perceptible. All that build-up, and then it was just over with. The culture warriors went home or elsewhere, and gay people who wanted marriage certificates got them. Which is funny, as Matt pointed out, because Romney has now done a 180 on the issue.

The funny morphed into shameful. If there's one person who has the national platform to say, "People, trust me: this is so not a big deal," it would be Mitt Romney. His political career didn't really lose steam, and the state of Massachusetts hasn't been sucked into a black hole. I wonder if we'll ever get over the short-term gain.

But Christ, I thought during the few hours I watched the live stream of the Senate floor before I left for dinner, how does change ever happen when the system is built to be so resistant to it? Will there ever be anything but short-term gain?

So here: I'm happy to take the victory for what it is, and happy also to start working towards the next one.

Veggie Burger Haiku

My cookbook, Veggie Burgers Every Which Way went on sale this week! Pick it up from your favorite bookstore (these are my favorites if you live in New York; maybe they will have to order the book for you, and if that happens, be sure to express astonishment at the buyer's oversight: how could they not carrying such a hotly anticipated, well received book?) or order it online. But if you're a creative type, you may want to enter my Veggie Burger Haiku Contest, happening over at the veggie burger blog, and maybe you'll win a free copy. Check out some of these amazing submissions:

From Matt R:

Boca burger one
Wasn’t all that delicious
But I kept eating

Another, this from Scott Piro:

I microwaved you
You were gristly and yum
A world opened up

And then this gem from Rachel:

a fried hockey puck,
mostly consisted of rice
but got me thinking

You don't have to write a veggie burger poem; you only need to answer a simple question (though the poems are clearly a lot more fun). The contest closes Thursday night! Show me your esoteric veggie burger love.

Grilled Brunch Pizza

My friend Matthew snarls when he says the word “brunch.” He dislikes—and I know he’s not alone here—what brunch has come to represent, which is many things, including: overpriced, dressed up hangover food for a certain breed of New Yorker who probably shares my demographic. Another thing that I think Matthew takes issue with is how brunch sucks the wind right out of one of your two precious weekend days. (I should add that I’ve never known someone to time-manage as he does; I confuse his afternoon checklist for my monthly one; hell, I don’t even do checklists.) On this point, I’ve been agreeing a lot lately. I am reluctant to watch my day pass by through mimosa goggles, and in my mind, at least, the minutia of my chores consume me more than they ever used to. Furthermore, I can’t even drink before sundown without having to nap for the rest of the day.

Probably anyone who’s ever been a waiter knows the specific breed of asshole that appears during the brunch shift. I shouldn’t call them assholes, because I have certainly been one of them before. They roll their eyeballs back in their head and flop their forearms on the table in exhaustion when you take their drink order—Omigod, coffee. And/or they act all scandalous—they lower their lids and confer with their dining companions in stage-whispered sex voices—when deciding to go through with bloody marys. And then, because this is brunch, the check comes to $12 per person and they’ve occupied their tables for 1.5 hours and still want more coffee. But what it comes down to is that I’m complaining. Brunch is simply more work than any other shift for a server, with all the damn beverages and bread baskets and requisite fits of entitlement whenever either run empty, and comes with significantly less pay. So. I hate brunch, too.

But stripped of its associations, it’s worth reminding oneself that brunch is nothing more than the midpoint between breakfast and lunch, and when one isn't all a-clutter with weekend chores and happy to spend a few hours in the kitchen, it can be a nice way to make for a two-meal day. This was the thinking behind the “Brunch Pizza” I made this weekend at my Dad’s house. I used this crust, substituting a cup of whole-wheat flour for some of the all-purpose stuff, and based the toppings on this recipe, nixing the bacon in favor of olives. On a second pizza I cracked the eggs over a bed of crispy hash browns, which was placed on top of a thin layer of mozzarella; this latter one was the winner. Then I cooked them on a hot grill because it was nice outside and I had access to a grill.

(This is a good time to announce that I’ve just signed up book number two: Vegetarian Entrees Every Which Way: Building Blocks and Over 80 Recipes for Everyday Main Dishes All Through the Year. Yup. It’ll be a very different kind of challenge from Veggie Burgers—a welcome one, in fact, and in many ways more interesting for me to develop since it will represent the food I eat most nights; also, while I do love veggie burgers, it’ll be some time before I care to eat them for 8 meals a week again—due out at some point next Spring or early Summer. I’m going to need help. Please email me if you want to try out recipes.)

But there were some problems with the Grilled Brunch Pizza. First of all, grilling—and I mean grilling, not barbecuing, as many a Southerner has corrected me (barbecue is the thing you eat and not a verb, as in, “Let’s y’all eat some barbecue, y’all”)—is something I am hugely not adept at. I’ve never had one, and growing up I didn’t pay the grill any attention because it belonged in the domain of garages and tool sheds and football—“man stuff.” So I botched this pizza up a little. I should have known that the grill would get too hot and burn the crust before the eggs would cook completely, even though I put high heat on one side, and low heat on the other, and cooked the pizza over the low-heat side where it wouldn’t be directly over the flame. (A helpful tip: go easy on the toppings if you’re cooking your pizza on a grill. You only want it in there as long as it takes for cheese to melt.) Also—and this is something I know to do, but the Food52 recipe seemed to garner such acclaim I was strong-armed into following the instructions exactly—when I was making the crust, I dumped all the flour in at once, rather than starting with half to two-thirds of what’s called for and then working more in as needed. The resulting crust simply had too much flour in it and none of those desirable pizza traits, like being both crisp and pliant. It was one-dimensional and boring, and broke off like a Linzer cookie (part of the problem was that it was on the brill for too long). Thankfully, there is potential here, but next time I’ll have to do it in my oven, and maybe as a vegetarian dinner entree.

The Last Mother's Day

I went shopping for the last Mother’s Day gift I ever bought about a week before the actual holiday, which at the time was me exercising a great deal of foresight. I was 23, and one thing that had changed as I evolved from a teenager to a college student to an adult was that I was becoming much worse at giving gifts than my younger self had been. I used to love giving presents; the indulgence was almost the same as if I were treating myself. I would volunteer to go Christmas and birthday shopping for my Dad, my brother, and my grandparents because I enjoyed it so—I was literally put in charge of my grandparent’s Christmas stockings—and I was very good at it. For a short time I contemplated opening up a personal-gift-shopper business. But since I entered my twenties, and since the scope of my priorities narrowed considerably after coming out and moving to New York, to the extent that my own gratification has become almost all-consuming, gifts have become tedious and difficult. Everyone I know seems to have all that they want or need, and when I do try to give thoughtful gifts—books, namely—I can sense that it’s being received as a kind of imposition. Why can’t I just treat them to brunch? This is something I am working on.

But the last Mother’s Day needed to be different, because my mom had just gone into remission after seven month’s of treatment for leukemia. I spent a beautiful Saturday exploring the West Village, eventually walking through the Bleeker street fair where I came upon a necklace I thought to be understated and beautiful: a dozen and lumpy pearls, spaced out by about three-quarters of an inch on a thin gold chain. I know nothing about jewelry—as little about jewelry as I do about clothes, which is something else that changed when I entered my twenties: I began to loathe shopping for anything but food—so when the designer told me that the pearls were “more real” because of the imperfections, and that the necklace was one of her favorites, a “truly original piece,” I completely believed her. I paid $50 for it.

I sent it down to Mom in North Carolina with a card and she seemed happy with the gift. Mom literally had a new lease on life, and was elated by almost everything. She was ready to host a luncheon. Having only moved to North Carolina from Idaho about a year before she was diagnosed, she didn’t have much time to make friends. But the few she had made through a golf club she invited over one weekday afternoon. She discussed her menu with me, and I gave her many colorful suggestions, and in the end she went with a recipe for Quiche Lorraine from the Junior League of Boise cookbook. The only reason I mention this luncheon is because there’s a photo that was taken during it: my mom is at the head of the dining room table, mid-afternoon sunlight is bursting through the blinds, she’s wearing a lime-green top and floral-print capris from Talbots—and strung around her neck, coming down just to her clavicle, is the necklace I gave her. In the photo she still looks forty pounds lighter than normal, and her hair is growing back only in patches, and the chemotherapy has given her a dark, unglossy tan, but she possesses an inner glow that—well, you know what kind of inner glow it is. It is the “alive and living” kind of inner glow.

The next time I saw her wear the necklace the circumstances were very different. Mom had come out of remission after about a month, and my grandfather, my brother, and I were all in North Carolina for an indeterminate period during which we slowly acknowledged the ramifications of her cancer. We all went to the doctor with her for a visit; I can’t remember if the doctor had requested it, or if we had demanded it. All five of us were crammed into a small exam room where he delivered her predicament, which was not a good one. He explained that attention would now shift from “treating” my mother to making her as comfortable as possible (this included a prescription for morphine), and that hospice workers would be in touch, and, in front of us all, he asked if my dad was ready to sign a Do Not Resuscitate form. We all broke down during that appointment, first my mom, then my dad, then the doctor, and, quietly, the rest of us. When we left in separate cars, my Dad returning to work in one, my mom, grandfather, brother, and I in the other, she said “I guess I should be used to the bad news by now,” and announced that we’d be going out to dinner that night.

My mom dressed up for the occasion, in another Talbot’s duo, and wore the necklace. When she came downstairs, I told her what the necklace designer had told me, that the pearls were real and valuable and that it was a “truly original piece.” She regarded me skeptically, amused, and said, “Hm.”

The place we decided to go to was one of those sports bar-slash-steak house restaurants with enormous flat-screen TVs in every field of vision, where the waitresses wear tank tops and miniskirts and are mostly spray-tanned. We were seated outside, adjacent to the parking lot. When the waitress took our drink orders, my mom defiantly ordered a virgin margarita, as if we were there to celebrate (for most of her life she drank Chardonnay, but since she’d been sick, she’d not been able to drink any alcohol at all). When the server returned with our drinks, she warned my mom that the bartender wasn’t sure how to make virgin margarita. “It doesn’t taste like anything,” Mom said after taking a sip, and asked for a virgin strawberry dacquri instead.

I have been a very lucky person for my entire life, in pretty much every way, and I believed then, even after the doctor’s appointment, that I was lucky enough that my mom would miraculously recover. But the stress, if subliminal, had its impacts. It seemed reasonable at the time to be jetting back and forth to New York for a job interview (a job that had a start date I obviously wouldn’t be able to commit to for the foreseeable future), and I didn’t feel guilty—in some ways I felt entirely entitled—that those “job interview” trips home were merely a guise for being able to see my first serious boyfriend. Also, I was 23 and had formed many self-righteous opinions due to my liberal arts education and my first few years of living in New York. For example, my entire family except for me was wearing LiveStrong bracelets. I hated those things and claimed, haughtily, that Lance Armstrong was turning death into “the ultimate failure.” I believed that my brother in particular, who had a tan line from his LiveStrong bracelet and had read the entire Lance Armstrong oeuvre, was treating my mom’s sickness as some kind of sporting event. Confiding in my mom’s hippie friend and in her psychiatrist friend, I spoke of how I wanted my mother to feel at ease with dying, that it was natural if unfortunate, and certainly I didn’t want her to feel that she was failing anyone. While I still believe in this kind of thing, and still have issues with Lance Armstrong, I see that I was idealizing greatly—and also that I was being an asshole.

But at dinner that day, we were not speaking much. My brother, who is two years younger than me, had been obsessing over trucks. He wanted to buy one of those big ones with a backseat and a hitch and a tool box built into the bed; this was something he thought to be aspirational and sensible; I thought the whole thing was idiotic and I was willing to cite all the things New York people cite when it comes to SUVs in contrast to our own brilliant public transportation. While we were eating, an enormous truck pulled up, as inconspicuously as a bomb exploding, and parked directly alongside our table. The diameter of its wheels were my entire height, such that the driver needed the built-in stepladder to get in and out of it, and it was covered in decals suggestive of fire and virility. I scoffed audibly and declared it to be the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. This set my brother off. “Just because you don’t want something doesn’t mean that no one else can have it!” he said, viciously, to which I responded, “Just because something exists doesn’t mean that anybody needs it!” equally viciously. I may have paraphrased here, but the argument ended in stony silence, with me vowing to never speak to my brother again. I turned my gaze to the horrible parking lot where the horrible monster truck was parked, and as hard as I tried to stop it from happening, tears welled up in my eyes. I eventually faced the table to find my mom looking at me narrowly, though not unforgivably. (It wouldn’t be for several months that I’d realize my role in ruining this dinner.) When we got home, I followed her up to her bedroom, where she take off the necklace and prepared for bed before shutting the door. A few minutes later I went to bed myself. It must have been 7:00 PM.

After my mom died, in the months during which my dad made an unprecedented, astounding amount of purchases, my brother and I went to pick up a car part for him. The woman working at the shop was wearing a necklace eerily similar to the one I’d given my mom; the only difference was that this one had a silver chain. She told me she’d bought it a yard sale. I haven’t done the necessary homework, namely because I don’t know the keywords for jewelry (“pearl necklace” hardly narrows the search), but my sense is that the necklace I gave my mom is only special in the very relative sense: as special my mother would allow it to be.

*

Matt took me to breakfast this morning—my personal emotional warfare zone of Mother’s Day Brunch—where there were a few mothers out with their kids. I used to want that so badly, to fly my mom up to Brooklyn for Mother’s Day and to show her my life here: go grocery shopping, go for a walk, buy new sheets, drink bellinis, etc. But it didn’t seem that any of these tables were enjoying themselves in the way I fantasize about my mom and I enjoying ourselves. Then for a moment I longed to be with my immediate family, my Dad and my brother. But I quickly realized I was indulging a similar fantasy; I know from experience that their company does not provide the type of shared grieving I theoretically want. In fact, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do—I was with Matt, I was eating breakfast pizza—and afterward I would be alone for a little while. And, not for the first time, I would find some solace in thinking back on all the details, including my regrets.