Here I Am...I'm here.

Reader, can you hear me?

Welcome! Thank you for taking a moment to read what I have to say.

I found food later in life and want to write about what it’s meant to me; how food and writing saved me when losses began.  I want to honor my parents the only way I know how, the only way I can now.  It’s been a challenge to remember good times because of the way their lives ended.  This is how I excavate the good times.

I was the first person in my family to go to college.  I was a girl.  Other than the men who went away for the military (draft), I was the only one who left home.  I was supposed to work in a cubicle, shut up, and not follow any muses.

I wanted to be obedient, that was in my DNA. But living like that made me feel like I was being held hostage. A damsel in distress, waiting for someone or something to rescue me. I finally realized that I had to learn to save myself and break free, whether loved ones liked that or not.

I never felt like I could embrace being a writer.  I never thought I’d become a chef.  I never thought I’d be family-less by forty-five.

This newsletter gives voice to my memories of my family using food as a conduit.  I want to use food essays as memoir.

I’m respecting my writing now and celebrating my creativity. This newsletter is the proof.

So let’s pop the cork and get started.

I had one of these when I was little.

But I didn’t play with it long. Soon I preferred reading and daydreaming. I didn’t find my way back into a kitchen for a couple of decades.

I lived on peanut butter and jelly and pizza and cereal. Later, I lived on bean burritos and more pizza.

I started to travel and meet people who cooked and ate, with gusto. I started to learn about food and wine. I started to find new ingredients and enjoy trying them.

I got laid off and started watching the Food Network. Rachael Ray episodes taught me how to cook. I’d walk to the grocery store, shop for recipe items, and play in the kitchen.

I met my love, G. He asked me to lunch one day and I said yes, practically before he finished the sentence. Then he took me to a sushi restaurant. I’d never had sushi. I never wanted to try sushi. But I sat down and got to know G while I picked up sushi rolls with my chopsticks and choked it down.

I got a call on a Saturday from my grandmother in Ohio in 2005. My dad had a stroke and was en route to the hospital.

That was the start of a big wave of sadness and stress that picked me up and didn’t let go for years.

While caregiving, I took evening cooking classes to inject some relief into my life of pharmacy, rehab, and hospital runs.

After two years, I decided to apply and earn a culinary degree. A month before classes started, my dad passed away. A week later, his mother passed away.

Cooking saved me.

While in school, I got to go to France and Italy. My mom had waited for years to cook with me. We had a new pastime: planning menus, grocery shopping and trying new meals. Our holiday menus were events in themselves.

G and I moved grabbed at a chance to move to San Francisco in 2013 after a decade or more in Ann Arbor. My mom never forgave me for that. She hated it.

I was in heaven. I’d lived in Nashville and Cleveland and Ann Arbor, but I longed to live on the coast. To see more and experience more and more and more.

I walked the streets of San Francisco and drank coffee and slurped noodles and visited food trucks galore. I spent weekends in wine country.

Then I got a phone call while we were on a weekend getaway in Paso Robles. Mom was in the hospital and diagnosed with a rare cancer.

The next thing I knew I was using all of our airfare points flying back and forth to Michigan. A suspended surgery attempt, then a successful one, but it lasted for over ten hours.

Mom slowly recovered. She bounced in a bounce house at a kids’ birthday party and worked in her garden. Years before, she’d started going to Naples, FL for winters. G moved us to Naples in 2015 so that I could spend a few months with her each year.

She had a setback and then she was gone in December 2015.

Both of my parents were barely sixty-five when they died.

I started to realize that I associated them with times spent in the kitchen, at the dining table. I made Christmas cookies and Mom was with me as I rolled the dough and cut out the festive shapes. I’d see peaches at the farm market and buy them to make cobbler in Mom’s honor. G and I would have a really good burger and think, dad would’ve loved this.

We had a hard road, the three of us as a family. My dad was twenty-eight and still lived with his parents when he met my mom. My mom had a romance that was broken up by her mother. She met my dad and married him to get out of her parents’ house.

My dad’s parents were silent and kind of a non-entity. My mom’s parents and sister were intrusive and demanding. Struggle and stress, financial hardship, disagreements and fights made up my childhood.

My mom finally left my dad after twenty-five years. She reconciled with her first love and eventually married him. Dad returned to his mom’s house and never left.

For all that, I was the center of my parent’s hearts, without doubt.

When I lost them, I drowned in grief, angry that I didn’t have them anymore, angry that they didn’t have long lives or more chances at happiness. I felt the stabbing pain of seeing them in pain.

Once I started to notice the tiny moments that brought me happy memories, flashes of joy and laughs together, I started to pay attention. Finally I was strong enough to intentionally conjure them.

That’s what I will be doing here in this space. Recording these memories and exploring how food saved me. Thanks again for joining me.

I care about you. Please don’t forget to eat your greens.

***Written to Jill Barber’s albums, Chances and and Fool’s Gold.