The Hammer and the Mallet
Several readers of this blog have noted that it has been awhile since an update. That’s testimony, I suppose, to things “getting back to (the new) normal.” My mother’s house is on the market, her personal effects are being categorized for an upcoming estate sale, roofers are coming by to give me bids on the replacement of my hail-damaged roof, new tires are on my car, a new battery was installed at Sears when the old one almost conked out at grief group the other night, and so it goes. I seem to find something almost every day to completely tie up my time, and never quite get around to blogging, or ….grieving.
This weekend, for instance, my niece Jamie (correction: she likes now to be called “Jamison”) is in town to visit her favorite uncle over Fall break (and other persons whom I’m not at liberty to disclose at this present time). Last night, to celebrate her arrival we hosted a dinner party at my house—the first one since that memorable day on July 9 that Susan hosted her last such party. The initial guest list escalated to 19 persons, but then got scaled back to 16 as a result of some last minute cancellations. As Jamie and I—with help from niece Megan—began arranging the tables and chairs and plates and serving utensils and so on, we kept asking ourselves, “how would Susan have done it?” Her presence permeated our planning process. This was assisted by the ever present photo in which her eyes seem to follow you everywhere you tread in her former domain (and which was alluded to by another blogger on this site). While Jamie and I tried to follow Susan’s expectations for “a proper dinner party” as much as we could, we did come up with our own rather radical innovations. For example we carried the kitchen table—up and over the sofa in the family room—and added it to the already elongated dining room table. We tried not to look at Susan’s photo while we did this—we secretly feared what she might have said about such an enterprise. But it turned out OK, and all of the guests had a comfortable place to sit: with the fossils including yours truly at the kitchen table end, and the younger folks down by Jamie who assumed the ultimate place of honor in Susan’s usual chair at the “foot” of the table. She did a wonderful job doing all the things that Susan would have done: serving the lasagna to each guest individually by hand, making sure we each had our drinks (I assisted somewhat in this), bringing out dessert and coffee at the end, etc. Susan would have been proud of her niece, and I thought I detected a bit more of a smile on that famous photo by the time the meal ended.
That smile began to vanish a bit when cleanup started. In Susan’s day we would never have begun cleanup with the guests still there. No, no we would not. But the younger, modern approach is to use the manpower (and womanpower) while you have it. So before I could intervene with a “but Susan would have….” the dishes were all in the dishwasher, the floors were being vacuumed, the kitchen table put back where it belonged, the leaves eliminated from the dining room table, and soon you couldn’t even tell there had been a meal served at all. These folks were efficient!
As the utensils were being put away suddenly two guests observed what in their view was a serious breach of kitchen sanitation. There, in the utensil drawer along with ladles and tongs and electric knife blades was an ordinary carpenter’s hammer. And in the cabinet below, next to the barbequing implements was a huge rubber mallet. Suddenly, icy stares were directed my way. “Pop, why do you allow these dirty shop tools to reside with your clean cooking things?” They clearly were thinking to themselves that this newly-minted bachelor was lax in letting shop and kitchen commingle. “But, but….” I sputtered, “it’s not me. Susan put them there. She used them all the time.” I went on to explain that many afternoons as I whiled away the time upstairs in my study, I would hear this terrific pounding from downstairs. “Sugar, what’s happening?” I would shout down the stairs. “Just making dinner. Don’t worry about it,” came the reply. I never did figure out exactly what she was pounding on at those times. All I know is that dinner was always superb, and the meat was always real tender.”