Stirring the Pot

The closest I came this year to making a new year's resolution was promising my daughter I'd actually cook something new at least three times a week. I've been grabbing all sorts of ingredients, stirring them up, and letting them simmer. We never know how it's going to taste, and more often than not it's bound to be a recipe for disaster. Maybe, every once in a while, it'll be delicious. So many ingredients, so many variables. Life, and in our house these days, dinner, can be full of surprises.

Years ago, when my father was dying, I had lunch with a friend who was also on the verge of losing her dad. I was losing my favorite person on earth; she was losing a man who had, at times, caused her great emotional pain, and she was struggling with the ambivalence that goes along with years of unresolved conflict. Watching a parent die, no matter what the relationship looked like, is nasty business.

And it's complicated. It draws out all your emotions and stirs them up into a big mysterious stew and lets them simmer for what seems an eternity. A recipe for disaster some days; you just never know how the pain is going to taste. At that lunch, on that particular day, my friend and I descended inexplicably into a hysterical fit of laughter. An observer would have thought we were discussing anything but the death of a loved one. Sure, we had tears in our eyes, but laughter does that to you. There's just such a fine line between joy and pain. Indifference is so much simpler.

I thought about that lunch yesterday as I sat drinking a Starbucks, cackling with what would have appeared, to the casual listener, to be unadulterated amusement. I was on a conference call (yes, I'm very important) with my attorney and my financial adviser, discussing the sorry state of my finances and the relative costs and benefits of pursuing further discovery. Hilarious. The mere concept of having a conversation with an attorney about prudent spending when every sentence you utter costs another pound of flesh makes me giggle.

Every once in a while, with good reason, I need a good cry, but the truth is laughter is usually the best medicine. At the very least, that phone call helped me burn a few calories; I had come in from the cold thinking I'd never thaw out, and by the time I was done, I was sweating bullets. And I felt better than I had all day, despite the various disturbing revelations I experienced during the call. Wringing my hands and moaning wouldn't have changed the facts, and the cardiovascular benefits would have been negligible. You just gotta laugh.

Last night's stew was vegetarian chili. It was neither disastrous nor delicious. No voracious shoveling in, no scornful pushing around on the plate. Pure and simple indifference was what I got from those ungrateful children. Easy to recognize; not at all complicated. They were unmoved by the eight hours it took to cook it. (Who cares if those eight hours took place in a crock pot; eight hours is eight hours.)

I just had to laugh.