Yesterday I was rearranging books and shelves and came across an old notebook from around 1993.  In it I had written several things; synopses of stories, letters, etc.   I was surprised by what I read– it made me laugh and it made me cry.

In 1993 I had not yet been tainted by the internet; I wasn’t obsessed with knitting or fiber arts (although compared to most people I knew I was a freak). I had three little children but they lived far away with their father.  I wrote letters to them, and this is the draft of one that I found in this notebook:

Dear (children),

There is a place in Seattle called Jazz Alley, where people can eat dinner and then enjoy a show on the stage.  Not long ago we were there to see Stanley Turentine, who plays the tenor saxophone.  He was old and black and potbellied like a pet pig but wow! could he play a sax.  Jazz musicians, you know, call their instrument their “ax”, and so Mr. Turentine has his ax, the sax.  And his ax (the sax) is also old and black and… well, you get the picture!  There were four other people in the band:  a drummer, a pianist, a guitarist, and a bassist.  When they played you felt like you were riding through the middle of a waterfall– a musical one, that is.

So I come home and I tell everything to Elmo and Grendel that I just told you.  And do you know what they said?  They shrugged their shoulders and meowed “So?”. 

“So what?” they meowed, and stretched their front legs and their back legs and sauntered out of the room.  And I couldn’t understand this at all because jazz musicians call each other “cats”.  Like they’ll say “me and this cat had a jam session with our axes…” And so I naturally assumed that cats like jazz.  But now we know.  They don’t.

The city of Seattle is very big– bigger than Sacramento, bigger than Austin, bigger than Colorado Springs, much bigger than Jackson or Biloxi, but not bigger than Madrid.  Because it is so big, there are a lot of tall skyscrapers downtown.  Some of them have 70 floors.  but there isn’t enough room for all the people wo work downtown to park there, so I and a lot of other folks ride a bus from the eastside, across the lake to downtown Seattle.  Every day.  And back.

I had all but forgotten about Mr. Turentine at Jazz Alley.  And the cats– Elmo was a sweet silver Persian, originally named “Humo”, Spanish for “smoke”.  But he was irresistably cute like Elmo on Sesame Street, so Elmo he became.  Grendel was a vociferously vocal tiger-striped tabby, and together they really did seem to listen to my conversations and contemplate them with due gravity.

My children are all grown up now, and doubtless they do not remember the specifics of these letters.  I think about the computer age we live in and the fact that, since we no longer put pen to paper, finds like these won’t happen in the future.  We may run across computer printouts, but probably our words will remain embedded in electronic circuitry, never to be found again.

We progress, and our losses are great.

The ripples of Serenity continue to widen, and I am thankfully at the edging charts now.

Nanny Granny has come for a visit, and it is nice to see her again. She is now 178 years old, though most people don’t believe this. She was born on May 28, 1830, the very day that Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. Nanny Granny is not Indian as far as she knows, but claims that the three things every young lady should know (how to swim, ride a horse and shoot a gun) are mainly meant to deflect any attempt at other Removals by Congress. She has always feared a Female Removal Act, I suspect.

Anyway, I once asked her how she had managed to live so long. She looked at me sympathetically and told me her secret: “honey, if a person never ever puts their tongue in the hole where they lost a tooth, they will live as long as Methuselah.”

Alas, I remember tonguing my empty tooth space every time the tooth fairy had to be summoned. I don’t altogether believe her, but who can argue with a woman not far from celebrating her own bicentennial?

I asked Nanny Granny about her old friend Miss Kitty.

“Well now, she’s gone and changed her name, bless her heart,” said Nanny Granny.

“Really?” said I.

“Yes, well you know she’s in the advanced stages of Lolzheimer’s disease, don’t you honey?” She patted my hand, afraid she was upsetting me.

“You mean Alzheimer’s, Nanny Granny.”

“No, I recollect it to be Lolzheimer’s. She changed her name to Miss Kitteh and says things like ’srsly’ and ‘ur doin’ it wrong’ and prays to the ceiling cat constantly. Bless her heart. I don’t think she’s going to be with us much longer.”

I was astounded.

Last night I saw Merely the Maid making something that looked delicious. It turned out to be Anjou pears, quartered and covered with sugar and butter, left in a very hot oven to become caramelized. When they were done, she poured in about a cup of heavy cream and stirred it up. I swooned, it was so heavenly tasting.

“Merely!” I said to her. “You have really turned out to be a very good cook!”

She looked at me mischievously and said “Mis Sippi, this is a case of mistaken amenity. I didn’t cook that… my sister did!” At this, she pointed at her identical sister.

This woman, it turns out, is Clearly the Cook.

I bet ya’ll didn’t know I have a maid. Her name is Merely, and I found her in the mirror one day when I was wishing desperately that someone other than me could clean my house. Some folks say that I am Merely the Maid, but I disagree. I am free to do whatever I wish—program, blog, cycle, knit, weave—without the interruption of pesky chores.

Merely is a frousy sort of person, a little soft around the edges, if you know what I mean. Her hair is a bit frizzy and she’d look a heap sight better if she’d just put on a little lipstick and get rid of those old sweat pants, but I figure if all she’s doing is cleaning my house I won’t pester her with pickiness regarding her looks. I don’t know where she’s from originally, but I suspect it’s Not From Around Here, because she all too frequently gets a little twisted in her idioms.

Anyway, I put Merely to cooking on Sunday. I was tired of leftovers and quickie fixies and wanted real food. Real homemade bread was my plan, with curried butternut soup. I happened to see Merely as I passed by a mirror (I rarely see her elsewhere) and decided to ask her if she was up to the challenge.

“How are you doing, Merely?” I asked her.

“I’m happy as a crab, Miz Sippy,” she replied. She calls me Miz Sippy; I don’t know why.

“Clam,” I corrected her. “Happy as a clam.” She looked at me steadily, saying nothing. I asked her if she could do some cooking for a change and she readily agreed. It seemed circumspect for me to watch her first efforts at this chore, and so I hung around the kitchen while she commenced.

Claire, the black Labradorian, also felt inclined to watch and to provide what services she could when it came to cleaning up dropped ingredients. Sherlock watched for intruders from the cushioned back of the living room sofa.

Everything went fine for a while, but when the bread dough had been comfortably set to rise in its greased bowl, the kitchen was looking a little used. Bowls and spoons and measuring cups were starting to pile up, flour was everywhere and little crusty bits of dough dangled engagingly from the sides of cupboards. By the time the soup preparation had commenced I started to worry that Merely had it as her goal to use every pot, pan and utensil in the kitchen, a considerable number of implements considering that two independent households had been merged into one. I folded the worry away and poured myself a nice glass of red wine.

Merely chopped a large yellow onion finely, scraping it into a clean bowl as she worked. Claire rushed to eat the pieces that dropped on the floor, but soon decided she preferred less pungent treats, so there they remained. I wondered why Merely didn’t use the food processor, but she doesn’t have a real high IQ and I didn’t want to interrupt her to ask.

After putting the onions on to cook with butter and curry powder, she took the exceptionally large butternut squash and attempted to peel it with a palm peeler. It became slimy and popped out of her hands like a champagne cork onto the floor, nearly beheading Claire. She tried using a more conventional vegetable peeler but couldn’t get a purchase with that one, so she turned to a traditional paring knife. Frustrated with the giant squash, she split the whole thing into quarters with a large butcher knife, and then peeled it and finally cut it into pieces, dropping several to the floor that were efficiently removed by her assistant, Claire. The squash went into another, larger clean bowl to wait for the apples.

She repeated the process with apples, throwing the cores to the agile Claire, eating a piece or two herself as she hummed an old hymn that sounded a lot like “Bringing In the Leaves”; she then grabbed another knife to peel the apples, and another bowl in which to put the result.

Seeing that the chicken stock she had removed from the freezer earlier had not thawed, she took another bowl and dumped it in so that she could use the microwave to defrost it. After a few unsuccessful minutes on the defrost cycle, she dumped it, brothsicles and all, into the pot along with the squash and apples. At some point she noted that the pot really wasn’t big enough to hold all this, but she put it in anyway, spilling some more in the process, Claire to the rescue but unable to help with the little spots of liquid burning on the electric eye, filling the kitchen with a hazy perfumed quality.

After the squash and apples had softened (twice as long as the recipe said it would take), Merely got out the food processor. So she does know how to use one, I thought… erroneously. She strained the squash mixture into another, very large clean bowl with a clean, very large strainer, and then plopped it into the food processor to puree it together with some of the liquid from the pot. Little bits of puree whirled around the kitchen as she removed the lid before the blade stopped spinning. Claire wagged her orange-spotted tail vigorously. Sherlock looked at me as if wondering when this person would be escorted from the premises.. Merely returned the mess to the pot, heated it through, and finally turned, wiping her hands on her apron.

I saw little bits of pureed squash in her hair; dried bread dough on her elbow, splattered milk on her glasses, and triumph on her face. I surveyed the damage in what appeared to be the Kitchen of Katrina; the uneaten bits of onion on the floor, the thirty-something used bowls; the knives, the spoons, the KitchenAid and the Cuisinart, the globs of squash and apple and dough on all surfaces.

“Merely,” I said, “are you all right?”

“Yes ma’am”, she said. “I’m just all suckered out.”

Yes indeed.

We had a delicious meal of homemade bread and soup, and I gave Merely the night off while I spent a couple of hours in the kitchen cleaning it all up.

She’s trainable, I just know it.