A meandering poem during which the author might have cooked dinner
It’s been suggested that Swedish meatballs would be nice to eat tonighT
Far be it from me to know what about them is remotely Swedish, or why on earth my grandfather thinks they’d be good over rice
When we have a surplus of pasta in the pantry
But regardless, it’s a wonderfully hands-on meal, requiring a fashionable, if dated, teal and yellow apron,
His mother used to make these, he said
And so for the night I am she and I get to know a distant woman after whom I was named
I shift the small book out of the shelf and flip it to the pages he indicated, as with many depression era recipes it’s deceptively simple
Spotting Ms. Child’s book wedged above me, I put on Terry and Toni’s songs and hope secretly that the house’s inhabitants take the first track to heart while I let my mind wander
Making the meatballs: combine all the things you bought and a few things from around the minty green kitchen, mash them with your hands while marveling at how much less squeamish you’ve become
I smile to myself, imagining a young Lily James twirling around the kitchen as the ineffable Donna, accompanied by her present day counterpart in Julia Child getup and garish accent
The two spin around with the girl who rambles in my mind, and I really should talk to Willy Nelson about learning to be a cowboy, baby
Crack an egg into the meatball mixture and mix with your hands and watch how I’m getting squeamish again
Soon enough Carole King taps on my shoulder and it’s not too late baby now to slip in her dulcet tones between missing daddy and the ominous somebody who’s following me...
only I’m in the kitchen and Carole is singing about Baby loosing his chance and I’m put in mind of my big brothers big hands wrapped around a big mug as the California sky chokes red with smoke
I wonder if the Garthwaite brothers ever saw the sky do that
And after being followed I’m put in mind of a moonshadow... this week was a pink moon, which deceptively and disappointingly is not actually pink, but was pretty anyways
Finally, the egg has disappeared into the mess of beef and pork, and I turn to rinse the fear of raw meat off
If some god was one of us
I make a mental note to ask the record people if they’ve got this LP Once I get back to the house I’m really living in
If there’s a heaven, sings Toni
And I’m in a wide blue room or possibilities, maybe it’s narcissistic of us to believe we matter in life, much less in death
Roll the meatballs into small balls and cook them in hot oil
So I start the oil and scare myself with a water test as I wonder whether I’ll ever go downtown, and whether any of this should really count as scatting if it’s not Ella doing it
I decide it’s best to call it a scatting approximate, and grin privately at the thought of these wild music women
A body’s gotta have more than just a few bolts loose in order to make those noises into a microphone, and thank god they did
I paper some cookie sheets while the drums dissolve into some kind of quasi-zydeco and Donna dances around in long skirts and a tambourine, and if I join her for a shimmy or two that’s no ones business but my own
We take a brief interlude for Fitz and Ron to regale the meatballs and me with some delightful noodling, and then it’s off to Brownsville while I shakily throw the meat at boiling oil
Ms. Julia and I are following Donna and my great grandmother in a spirited line dance when shards of a lullaby I used to know better cut through our revelry
And then there’s nothing to do but totake a detour into the White Album,
If I wasn’t so pressed for time keeping the meatballs from burning I might’ve tracked down Liza’s rendition,
but I have to satisfy myself with the memory of her stool and spotlight, and some ill-executed vocal runs that are at best put to shame by Paul’s lilting notes and at worst an affront to the very memory of the Garland women
The meatballs are beginning to sweat, and before I get the chance to switch over to the sexy preacher man’s boy, Toni starts in on the melancholy tale of a debatable alcohol problem
And I’m back in my grandmothers dining room, picking at turkey and cranberry sauce while everyone debated how to track down my uncle now that he’s gotten himself lost after rehab, and I wonder privately to myself if perhaps it was better our family stopped reproducing all together
But that would mean I wouldn’t be an aunt to the cheery chubby boy I hope to hold someday when the world no longer breathes disease, and after all, a niece on the way can’t be a bad thing as long as we all remember to be better about our vices, and
Making the gravy: while the meatballs brown, add flour, Worcestershire sauce, think of your childhood friend with that hard to pronounce last name, the one you told you might like girls, and who replied that she thinks she’d like to move away from everyone to a farm with a gun, and would you like blue or purple nail polish this time?
Add pepper because you don’t trust your white family, and silently thank Ms. Brown for moving on to something upbeat
While I sift flower over quickly burning oil, I wonder whether the faeish Irishman had ever listened to time telling him, while he wrote about Nina and Movement
Toni’s ready for a good man
but did you ever really think you’d love a man like me
And I ought to put that on soon, but here comes my grandfather to hold his face over the sizzling pan and query with a young boys eyes whether he can help
So you let him start water boiling for the noodles, forgetting in your musical fog that he approaches even the loosest of cooking with an engineers eye,
And even though it’s a full half an hour later before he even sets the noodles cooking, you’re glad he came in
You can feel his mother smiling through you as he reminisces about the smell of the dish
But before then the band strikes up a lilting guitar piece about generational trauma, and all at once you yearn to put on the Highwomen and messrs David, Stephen, Graham, and Neil
And maybe the Berkeley musicians are meaning their tune to soothe the burns of the War, but you begin to feel the familiar specter of parenthood creep over you again
And you’re frozen briefly, while the noodles bubble and the meatballs crackle and pop and the green beans wait patiently to be shucked
And you see in your minds eye again the house you dream of and the night you hope for, when the family is asleep and they trust you care for them, and the scrapes have bandaids and the bellies have food and the foreheads have kisses and the arms have hugs
And you return to the present where the family you made food for today is waiting to eat it, and you decide to trust Ms. Toni and Father Time and wonder do they know, can we tell them, they will follow only if they can
