A Layered Valentine

 An onion, or two, for Valentine’s Day.

“Not a red rose or a satin heart,” as poet Carol Ann Duffy wrote. Nor “a cute card or a kissogram.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with those.

Love is often linked, aptly and sometimes egregiously, not only to light and dark but to food and drink.  Comfort foods which harken back to the idiosyncratic home cooking of childhood, at least for those, unlike my own sons and daughters, lucky enough to have grown up with a competently sustained culinary oeuvre.  Obscenely costly symbols—authentic Champagne, caviar, pure 24K gold itself shaved over Black Forest Truffles as insular and dense as volcanic rock.   Family recipes handed down for better and for worse.  Flourlesss chocolate wedding cake.  Fresh cardinal-red strawberries and purple cauliflower.  Friends who make and feed us the only foods we can manage to eat in times of abject grief.

In my experience, rarely had love’s layers been called to mind by the sulfenic acid particulates which aerosolize as one dissects a vegetable.      

But on my counter sits a stalwart couple: a towering purple onion listing slightly over its companion, a small golden onion, as if giving shelter. They have long outlasted all their brethren, delivered to me by a friend not driven to distraction with anxiety at the thought of going inside in winter to purchase daily bread. Only their surfaces are slightly worse for wear, separating along sepia fissures at their translucent outermost layers, furling ever so slightly, more like Rilke’s unending rose petals than the chafing away of our own perishable brittle epidermal layers, cracked by sub-zero cold. 

Although I unceremoniously felled some of their brethren, I do not plan to do harm to these companionable Alliums. 

I consider them my Valentines. 

Early in the pandemic, knowing both of the exceedingly difficult anniversaries which inhabit my outsized winters and in-house medical issues (soon to be compounded by my mother’s CoVid diagnosis), friends from work began driving significant distances to bring me food. 

After a scale revealed that I had dipped down into double digits, I was delivered troves of healthy food, including bountiful salads someone had endured quite a lot of volatile red onion vapor to adorn. . .along with a not inconsiderable amount of my favorite less healthy treats. The sustaining bounty arrived on my birthday, and fortified me for the hollowed-out holidays which followed.  My brother brought me highly sweetened booze, just in case, to toast my birthday and Jim’s, although of course Jim does not age.  A friend sent Maine coffee to warm my mornings, and then decaffeinated coffee once I had to forgo the real thing.

Writ large, multitudes, alone and in countless communities, continue to risk their own health to continue to provide meals and groceries to those in need of them.    

A century ago, in the pandemic season of her time, Julia Neill Sullivan, at 72, cooked pots of food in the small cottage on Ireland’s west coast where she had raised thirteen children, hauling meals across a stony field to those stricken by influenza and too weak to feed themselves.  More than 50 million people perished worldwide, but her own grace in her remote corner of the world ensured that others would survive. Generations have followed them.

Suffering and deprivations are immense.  It is hard to know where to begin, and daunting to consider all that we cannot heal or fix—certainly not by ourselves, and maybe not while we still walk here.    

But the gift of grace is ours to take as far as each of us can carry it.  It is exponential and enduring.  Trauma can unfold and carry its scars across time, but so does the grace “to help in time of need.”

In his last newspaper column, at the end of May, Jim Dwyer wrote about those who at their own peril now come to the throne, to feed the sick and those whose calling is to minister to them.  He also gifted us all with this final sentence about what Julia Sullivan did a century ago: “In times to come, when we are all gone, people not yet born will walk in the sunshine of their own days because of what women and men did at this hour to feed the sick, to heal and comfort.”

Food is not, strictly speaking, love, but the impulse and the calling to bring or serve sustenance to someone else is. We all need, and may be called upon to give, any “provision for the way” that we are capable of giving. 

Purple Chimes and Valentines

Sweet as” was in the glossary I picked up from fellow travelers during my recent adventure.

It’s a New Zealand term of assurance: all is well, “no worries” (a phrase that now hits my ear as  well-meaning  but oxymoronic, a double-negative coupling of “no” and  brow-furrowed “worries”; like being told not to envision a pink elephant, if I’m told not to worry, I’m going to worry).

Where “no worries” comes to a declarative full stop, the object-less “sweet as”  is gloriously open-ended, and calls to mind all my (slightly belated) Valentines.

The list is, as we say in the business, not limited by enumeration.

Sweet as….

My friend Barbara’s face when I first saw her, not knowing she’d made the long trip, downstairs at Phillips Church after hundreds of people had paid their respects and filed out.  (She does not know that the purple glass chimes she gave me years ago now hang on the window overlooking my Brady’s garden.  Their gentle clinking restores the missing sound of his bright blue tags as he made his way from flower to flower.)

The friend who told me he’d be there in ten minutes–from another state, on a traffic-filled holiday weekend–when I desperately texted that I had to make an unbearable decision about my beloved middle beagle, then dispensed (and even re-collected) a stream of tissues to me in the aftermath.

My newest friends, who made me laugh harder than I have in years, picked me up when I slipped on Morocco monkey ice (story to come), taught me Australian card games, and tried fruitlessly to contain me from overspending my dirham.

George, a wildly busy colleague whose wife had died when his children were very young.  He always took my calls, called me when I had been silent too long, and knew when it was time for me to go back to the job I loved.

Joe and Diane, who showed up to help me move a daughter into her freshman dormitory  when Jim could not, and who took all of us into their home when the same daughter graduated.

A network of people I’ve never met in person, who take the trouble to read my blog and leave me messages about posts and share their own thoughts.

Friends who sent me flowers on Mother’s Day and after my father died, who helped my children when I could not get to them because of competing crises in other states and countries, who shared their own heartaches with us and helped us see “the size of the cloth.

G., who secured for me the music for Jupiter and in whose office I knew I could always appear and get my bear hug without needing to speak.

Bethany, whom I met getting ready to go on a great big stage where we both told our stories, and arranged for me and my son to hear a long sold-out John Hiatt show after I told her the story of the golden CD my husband had burned for me years before I found it.

Jim’s lifelong friends, who visited him when he was sick and brought him a touchstone of their shared past, and who still invite me to their family events and allow me to be a part of theirs and their children’s and even their grandchildren’s lives.  Jim’s family, who became my family long ago.

David Subnaught (so-dubbed  to distinguish him among many distinguished college Davids), a classmate of Jim’s who flew from Colorado to the East Coast to be there for my eldest son’s graduation two months to the day after Jim died.

Tineke, my best woman, the first person I called.  She literally fed me, cooking from scratch  the only things she knew would tempt me, when I could not manage even that.  Best man Jon, who drove to us on the night we finally brought Jim home bearing pictures he’d taken the night before our wedding and had us all laughing so hard we may have unnerved our children.  Randy and Judy.  Dr. Bob.

You know who you are.

 

 

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