Whisk

Whisking up pancake batter this morning, I thought of Lucien Truscott IV, and how he changed my mind about making pancakes.  Are people capable of true change?  My skepticism may account for my crankiness around New Year’s rituals, the baptismal alcohol bath followed by penitence and promises.  I prefer to go to bed around ten, the town square midnight fireworks exploding only softly into my unconscious.  Lucien Truscott IV, however, changed my mind about pancakes, with a New York Times op-ed in 2002, and it has had lasting consequences.

Pancakes were for special occasions, and they involved work.  I admired the Sunday morning breakfast dads who made pancakes, bacon, and coffee.  My worst pancake-making experience involved cooking stacks and stacks of the things for a beach-house full of people–I ended up chain-smoking over the pan, the martyred chef who never gets to sit down while her guests linger over second coffees. Never impulsively offer pancakes!

Truscott told the story of his eight-year-old daughter Lilly asking for pancakes on a school morning. He felt  flustered, dealing with bookbags and packed lunches and carpool duty, but he acceded.  Within ten minutes he was serving pancakes to Lilly and her little brother, Five (I do love that nickname, Five, almost as much as I love Lucien Truscott’s name itself), and he concluded that it wasn’t so hard. At the time, I had a ten-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son.  Three, a.k.a. youngest child, was on his way, though I didn’t know it yet.  Soon I would be entering a frame of mind that called for a larger house, one child banging away at a piano in the living room as another ran up and down the stairs, and a parent yelled out instructions from the kitchen while waving a wooden spoon.  Truscott’s embrace of weekday morning pancakes ushered in the era of generous-minded domestic chaos. Being a citizen of Los Angeles with a refined library, Truscott went on to experiment with pancake recipes from James Beard et al. that included flaming rum for the grownups.  Being a person who believes in small changes, I stayed with the box mix but have offered pancakes on school mornings ever since. With blueberries, banana slices, or chocolate chips. We didn’t buy a larger house.

The whisk was invented far later than the spoon, which took the form of a shell or stone in the paleolithic era.  Spoons are more basic.  You realize this the moment you are forced to eat Greek yogurt with a straw.  Spoons are necessary. Before it was an object, whisk was a verb (ahem, must get out the reading glasses) back in 1375: “The king…Vatit the sper…And with a wysk the hed of-strak.” It meant a brief, rapid sweeping movement.  To wysk off a head must have required a strong arm and a sharp blade. A whisk had become an instrument by 1666, any bundle of twigs or wires used for sweeping, or for beating children, or eggs: “By beating the White of an Egge well with a Whiske, you may reduce it from a somewhat Tenacious into a Fluid Body.”  Thus speaks the OED.

In the grocery store the checker asked me and oldest child if we had any resolutions.  We had none.  Resolutions should not only be made, but should be made public.  Our lack of resolution did not deter her from revealing hers, which was to save money and pay more attention to coupons.  This seemed admirable.  I should save money, make pancakes from scratch, have my wits about me at all times, and, of course, being American, lose weight.  However, since such ideas make me want to shop online while drinking chardonnay and stuffing cookies in my mouth, I shall refrain. I whisk such ideas away in a whirl-puff (a gust of wind, circa 1382).

Binder clip

Any device that holds things together is a valuable one.  The binder clip not only fastens papers but also keeps bags closed and holds back curtains. Scotch tape has been a crucial binding material over the holidays, and so has bourbon & eggnog.  A little bourbon and eggnog with a sprinkling of nutmeg along about four o’clock in the afternoon keeps things together nicely.  By “things” I mean my personality.  Glue and thread hold book pages together, as in Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Marriage Plot, which is also bound together by Jane Austen’s marital narratives.  In grad school, when I had the flu I used to lie in bed reading from the collected Austen, secure in her orderly universe. Now, sick with a hacking cough, I lie in bed reading Eugenides’ novel, whose universe resembles my own, encompassing college in the early 80s in the northeast, France, Greece, Provincetown, and Princeton, New Jersey (called Prettybrook in the novel, Prettybrook being one of two exclusive country clubs in Princeton).  Recently I returned to Princeton for a party, at which women I’d known since 8th grade told me to read Eugenides.  Life feels very bound together at times, the present self inseparable from the 8th grade self. So much time has passed since high school that our connection transcended the angst of those years.  The person who made out with my boyfriend on New Year’s Eve of 1979?  She was a found-again best friend.  It’s fashionable to say that memory is unreliable, full of self-serving fiction, and that memoirs and novels are the same.  But we all lived in the geographical place known as Princeton together in the Christian calendar time of the late 1970s, our subjective and yet collective recollections attached to an actual sweet sixteen party under a white tent, or a real wooden kitchen table on Cherry Valley Road.  Fiction and nonfiction may be interwoven, but they are neither identical nor equivalent. Lying in bed reading this morning, I wanted a happy ending for The Marriage Plot, my hacking cough, and life in general, and somehow Eugenides pulled out a plausible one on page 406.  What a relief!  Still, I must find another of those smuggled codeine pills from Spain…

Just trying to keep it together!, I say.  Getting my act together here!, I say. Thanks for the binder clip! A binder clip is like bandaids, super glue, string.  Icing, staples, and wax. A scrunchy, a barrette, and spandex.  Memory and time, zippers and belts. Proximity, chance, and cornstarch.  Flour and eggs. The Dewey decimal system, a leitmotif, a rope. Twenty-two years of marriage.  Melody, resonance, echo.  Nails, honey, and skin.  Velcro.  Safety pins.

We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things–of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil–seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what’s worth knowing.

David Abram, Becoming Animal, p.6

Mattress pad

Oldest child was coming home from college, so I made up her bed.  She sleeps in the downstairs study now, which she tries to make me feel guilty about.  But since her father and I slept in that study for seven years (seven years!), only recently reclaiming the master bedroom, she’s not completely successful.  She’s partly successful–mother-guilt is a deep well. I smoothed on a white puffy mattress pad, hooking the elastic bands around corners, and I thought of what a familiar and comforting household task this was.  All’s right with the world in a house with mattress pads.

All is not right with the world.  Still, housekeeping is comforting.  Having mattress pads for the beds harks back to serious mid-century housekeeping, with linen tablecloths, swathed in plastic,  hung in closets.  Everyday china and good china. Spring cleaning.  Aprons and feather dusters, and children shooed out to the backyard to play. In the posture of bending over to smooth the bedding, I reenact the motions of women from decades and centuries past.  Sometimes it feels like enough to inhabit these postures, to occupy the form. Yesterday in yoga class I had the sensation of being anonymous, of being one of the numberless human beings to occupy eagle pose. I drop pillows into cases, turn on the reading lamp, lay winter sweaters in drawers.  Maybe the room will be cold–I fold an extra quilt at the foot of the bed.

Last weekend, at youngest child’s first wrestling tournament, as the pairs grappled and threw each down, I thought of the eternal forms and posures of wrestling.  (In fact, the Greco-Roman style of wrestling took form circa 1848 in France, but basic wrestling is surely archetypal.) All you want is not to be pressed completely against the ground.  You raise up any part of your body off the mat that you can–head, foot, elbow–to avoid being pinned.  As youngest child realized after the second match he lost, ‘You have to squirm.’ Wrestling is at ground level, everyone down on the mat yelling.  Novice parents are having an out-of-body experience, watching their child get attacked. The ref is on his belly, the coaches are on their hands and knees.  They are screaming at the wrestlers.  Get up, roll over, rise up. It seemed like such a brave human desire, not to be crushed flat.

Chocolate chip waffle

Specifically, my favorite household object right now is a bite of Eggo chocolate chip waffle soaked in maple syrup.  If you want to make it perfectly, toast the waffle, heat the syrup in a French ceramic pitcher, pour the syrup over the waffle, cut it into bite-size pieces for an eight-year-old, serve it for breakfast, clear the half-eaten mess, leave the plate sitting by the sink for twenty minutes, approach the plate with the intention of scraping the waffle into the trash but instead–in flagrant uprising against the divine monarchy of your low-carbohydrate regime–eat a bite.

If this baclava-like morsel were served to me in a European bakery I would be happy.

Have I lost my mind, or my palate? Too little sleep, too many Southwest Airlines candy-coated peanuts?  It was not a Proustian experience of remembered childhood taste, because I grew up on Aunt Jemima’s syrup, albeit with Eggo waffles popping golden out of their toaster slots just like on TV.  My children have always had maple syrup.  Maple syrup is in.  My husband has said, “We spend more on maple syrup than on gasoline!”  The rules of their childhood dictate maple syrup, cloth napkins, books everywhere, untidiness, and dogs that jump on you when you come in. (Plus a damp and disgusting basement, a mom who won’t drive on highways, etc., but why get into that?  Which reminds me of a Spalding Gray journal entry about his domestic life and his little son, Theo: “Theo keeps asking me to tell him a ‘scary story’ and at least I don’t say, ‘Look around you, this is the scary story…’”, August 9, 2001)

A film director said in the December 5th The New Yorker, “You have fifteen minutes to tell the audience, ‘These are the rules.’ ‘Jurassic Park’ teaches us to expect a T. rex, but if a T. rex comes thirty minutes into ‘When Harry Met Sally’ you won’t believe it.” (Michel Hazanavicius, director of the new black-and-white silent French film, “The Artist.”)   This is true!  I would have been taken aback had a T. rex charged into Meg Ryan’s sweet little Manhattan bookstore.  Some years ago, a deer charged through the plate-glass window of our local Hallmark store and rampaged around, an event that was scarcely believable even though it actually happened.

The rules of gastronomy say that a cold bite of syrup-soaked Eggo waffle will not be any good.