A book for me?!

a dedication

I’ve never had someone write me a love song, but Pearl wrote a book for me.

Can you see the name in parentheses?

8 years before I was born, an ordinary 59 cent composition book with the weird black and white camo on the outside and the wide rule lines on the inside received it’s first entry. “Petite Four” was penned in a remarkably unsmudged blue ink by a left handed woman named Pearl, my grandmother, who never learned or never cared about which words get capitalized and which don’t, or how to spell petit fours. However, she did learn and she did care about cakes, cookies, pies, and other delightful and unclassifiable sweets like needhams, apple squares, and “whipped topping,” made with everyone’s favorite ingredient, powdered milk.

Every page overflows with recipes and clearly no order was even attempted, “Cream Cheese Brownies” and “Ratatouille with sausage” share a two page spread. Taped to the inside cover, beneath a “Baking Powder substitute 1 tbsp soda 2Tsp cream of tarter” (again, capitals can take a flying leap) is a tiny half inch by two inch newspaper cutout with 1935 hand written next to it.

This is the story of how it all began. Two people working in a cardboard box factory fell in love. She folded the boxes that came out of his cardboard cutting machine. Cut and Fold. Cut and Fold. Cut and Fold. “Will you marry me?” Cut and Fold. Cut and Fold. “I will.” I imagine there was lots of noise and both of them yelling, “What? What did you say?” Or, maybe on the graveyard shift, he just shut the machines down on the die-cutting floor and it went from a deafening roar to silence and everyone in their colorless but pressed 1930s wear stood around and watched him get down on one knee and give her a ring she’d wear for 71 years that became as thin as a wire locked under her knotted left knuckle.

sidebar: Oh, how far we’ve come since 1935. I never had to advertise my intentions in the paper just in case my betrothed had another family or in case my former lover wanted to come forward and tell the church I wasn’t a virgin.

OK, this book is absolute mayhem. It pretends to be a cookbook and but throws in Easter eggs like intentions for marriage, how to make Santa Claus shaped door knob covers, a french beret for an infant, and a good window cleaning recipe.

“Makes them shine.” Yes, Gramme, alcohol makes everything shine for a few minutes. This might be the best advertisement I’ve ever seen. You know I’ll try it out.

The absolute disorder and order of this book reminds me of someone…Oh, it’s me. You should see the notes app on my phone—untold gigs of words and sentences I rarely refer to, but keep adding to—a giant word amoeba with no structure beyond phrases. One day, I’ll see the value of my collected thoughts and print them all out and give them to my granddaughter—a debut for my collected disorders. She will see my mispellings and repetitive thoughts, my varied and unrefined interests, my obsessions, and my absolute imperfection. She will scan them into an AI and it will tell her that her grandmother loved learning how to make things. All things. AI will attribute my word amoeba to the antiquated female BASF gene that doesn’t make stuff, it just makes stuff better. It will be determined that it corresponds to curiosity, attention deficit, post partum depression, low alcohol tolerance, and a highly romantic view of life.

That said, this book of attempted and failed order also reminds of something else far more elemental—life. How many times have I set out to give my life order and form? Trim hedges, wash dishes, organize the bread recipes, work out, etc. All are highways I drive onto, thinking there are no exits. This is who I will be from this point forward. I will be the type of person who puts all their recipes in one place, but then this recipe for puffy slime shows up. It’s unclassifiable. It’s a recipe, but not for food. And then the phone rings and I need to make an online payment because, uh, sometimes that happens, and then I need a piece of paper and none exist anywhere in my house except for in my new recipe book. So then, I am writing the confirmation code next to the customer service member’s name, Angela, and the amount I paid and the date, because these thing MUST be written down, and so begins my slippery slope—my descent into chaos. My modern memento mori.

I suppose all forms of order and structure suffer decay, be they promises, or bodies, or businesses, or homes, or recipe books, or trees.

Here is some unassailable proof: Took this the other morning on West Street here in Bar Harbor as evidence of time marching on and how beautiful it can be.

All this talk of decay reminds me of this poem by Robert Frost.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Memento mori can take many forms, from symbolic objects like skulls, hourglasses, or a Robert Frost poem, to a handwritten recipe book that emphasize the shortness of life. The idea of the memento mori is to convince us to live meaningfully, and consider our actions in light of inevitable death. Maybe my gram thought a book about making homemade Windex, or knitting a Santa Claus doorknob decoration while eating ratatouille would remind me to apply myself to life, because it’s what she did and well, she had a pretty good time.

Since it’s fall, apple season here in the Maine, I’ll leave you with this delicious recipe for “Skilled Fried Apple Crunch,” which is made in a skillet but requires very little skill (see what a menace she was). For a modern version, I’d substitute some sweet cream butter for that oleo and add a scoop of vanilla Häagen-Dazs.

Ciao,

n