Sick again

I am.

Sick again is also a song by Led Zeppelin.  It is interesting that the music composed primarily by Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones is now considered . . . . uh. . . taken seriously.  John Paul Jones indeed has musical training.  However Page is a self taught guitarist.  Their music is being dissected and analyzed these days by music scholars and what they are finding is nothing short of genius.

Any way, I am sick again.  It is a beautiful sunny day here.  According to the national weather service we are going to have nothing but beautiful sunny days for the foreseeable future. Corroboration of anthropocentric global warming or just the weather?

I wrote on FB that I accidentally stopped drinking coffee because I hadn't gone into work the last two days - Thurs and Fri. I believe I came down with a head cold of sorts.  It seems to have settled in my chest.  About half way through Thurs. I started getting a headache.  The kind where it feels like your head is going to explode.  The kind that makes me contemplate drilling a hole in my head to relieve some of the fluid pressure.  I imagine a geyser of blood shooting up or out of my head And as the arch of blood recedes so does my head ache. ahhhh.  Should work?  right? 

In the back of my mind I knew what it was and on Saturday morning I conceded to the answer.  Caf-fucking-fien.  About 5 minutes after taking some pain relief medicine with caffeine in it, my head started to feel better.  You know, I only drink about two cups of coffee a day.  I make two shots of espresso, add some hot water, and that's it.

I put this on facebook and one of Wendy's friends suggested I have chicken soup for my head cold.  Wendy said Jews call chicken soup Jewish penicillin.  I am thinking that every ethnic group calls it their penicillin - like Hungarians call chicken soup Hungarian penicillin.

So this morning I started looking up the recipe for the soup.  Wendy and I made it a number of times.  We made the soup for the high holidays and then the broth for Passover.  She had a little index card with the ingredients and instructions.  So I went to the little wooden box where she kept it and started looking through the cards and the papers that were jamb packed into that little box.  All the while, the feeling that I knew would come, started to come.

I went to the bookshelf to get her mom's cookbook.  Her mom along with her mom's friends made this cook book "way back when."  I suppose it was probably in the eighties when their lives were full.  I imagined her and her friends writing up the recipes, putting them together and going down to Kinko's to get the pages bound.  The names of some of the recipes hinted at fun times, like "Party Tuna Salad" (Okay, party and tuna salad really don't go together but for them it did) There are sections in there like "Breads","Deserts", "Holiday Dishes" "Fish, Meat, and Poultry", etc.  All of these dishes Kosher of course.  I imagined meals being prepared in the hustling bustling kitchen of the Zalut house hold.  The humid heat from water boiling, the rich smells of poultry seasoning, or cinnamon filling the air.  Wendy and her two brothers running around.  Playing.  Maybe playing hide and seek or building a fort with chairs, books, blankets while her mom and grandmother cooked appetizers, entres, and desserts out of this cookbook.  These were my memories of family get together's.  And then it hit me.

All of this was gone.  Her mother did not like the fact that I was not Jewish but I think she eventually liked me.  I had met her at Sam's Bar Mitzvah.  I was afraid of her.  She was luke warm to me. Both Wendy and I watched as her health declined and then we witness her death.  When she died, Wendy was reading a story from Kitchen Table Wisdom by Naomi Rachel Remen.  Wendy was holding her hand while reading a story out of the book and I think she felt the texture of her hand change.  She told her dad and her dad started talking to her but quickly realize Beverly Zalut had left this world.  I couldn't imagine what he was feeling.  Relatively speaking all I could say about how I was feeling was just sad, that is all, just sad.  Not profoundly so.  In fact, I probably felt simply somber.  Probably the most emotive thought I had was, "Holy shit, she's gone."  I suppose I might have been a little stunned.

A year and a half later Wendy would pass.

And now today I read what was.  I read about the plannings for getting together with friends.  I read about the things that at one time were prepared for people that are no longer here.

And as I looked for the chicken soup recipe I began to cry.  The damn broke and the tears came.

I went back to the box for a closer inspection of the pieces of paper and found nothing but recipes with her hand writing.  I found dishes that she would lovingly make for her children.  I found dishes that she would lovingly make for her ex-husband.  I found dishes that we would make together.  I found recipes for dishes that I would end up making for her.

And I realized that now I do hate cooking.  Cooking is something I told her I hated to do until I started cooking with her.  And then even for her.  I loved cooking for her.  I actually really did like it.  Now, I don't give a fuck about what or how I eat.  I hate cooking.

For vanities' sake, I just don't want to eat a lot and get fat.  Requirements on what I eat now are primarily related to time as in, "five minutes is the maximum amount of time that I want to spend screwing around with food."  As I found out today trying to cook from a recipe that she and I loved is just fucking painful.

I cried on and off for about three fucking hours.  I never did find the recipe for the soup and ended up going on line and found one similar to what I had in my memory.  Chicken soup and chicken seem to be big in the Jewish diet and I could not find any recipe for chicken soup in the house.  All I found was a flood of tears.