Biscuits,Photos and The Theory of Relativity

"It's so curious: one can resist tears and "behave" very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer...and everything collapses."

(Collette, 1873-1954)

We are made of the stuff of stars, says Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Lately, I've been feeling like my star-stuff has lost some of its vibrancy.

Some days I want to change my name to Virgo ZupraKlusta and run away to join an Artist's commune where I'll be the Chef and Medical Officer and I don't have cancer; where cancer isn't running my life.

Thinkin' that's prolly not gonna happen. Sadly.

When things get tough, I cook. I bake. I bake it out.

I love the rocking rhythm, the assuaging to and fro of my Chef's Knife doing a measured River Dance on the wood cutting board.  Soooooooothing.

I love the feel of biscuit dough alive under my hands, the elastic way it springs as I gently maneuver it. Too much handling makes both biscuit dough and pie crusts tough and leathery. We don't want that in pastry, so tenderest hands & mindfulness are required. 

I love that I can take inert ingredients and make them into something nourishing, sustainable; something to feed both a stomach and a heart.  The food I make is super-saturated with love, I like to think.

Love of the process, of the beautiful individual elements, of the final product that inspires such delight.

It took me many years to learn to make Biscuits and Pie Crust properly. I discovered the quality of each element matters tremendously. A sort of culinary Gestalt. 

The first pie crust I made forty-three years ago was so tough the dog wouldn't it eat; I was able to remove it whole from the pie pan, a floury Frisbee; threw it and it didn't break. Time taught me, time & experience, what that pie crust really needed in order to be toothsome. 

While this may be so obvious as to be gratuitous, I believe making a great pie crust or Biscuit is a metaphor for Life.  Those multitudes of nooks and crannies can hold just about anything you care to dress them with. That could be a Divine Jam or dog shit. I am determined to be consistently in the Divine Jam Category despite all the dog shit that seems intent upon accumulating here and there in one's life. 

I'm struggling with loss of control more and more. The closer my surgery date, the more aware I am of how precious little control I have over this process. I've also become rather painfully aware just how narrowly defined my personal homeostasis is...a parenthetical bracket whose comforting immutable borders I dwell within. Classical music must be playing...Patchouli or Sandalwood incense must be burning...every item of my household precisely where I placed it last, used it last, at the angle I put it. Same routine each day with seasonal variations.

I know. Sounds alot like a Control Freak, right? 

It's funny...I don't fret over dust bunnies, don't scrub faucets with toothbrushes or any of that Happy HomeMaker horseshit; I consider those actions to be indicators of a life half-filled, a waste of spiritual and cerebral energy that's best used being with those you love, making Art or Literature or Food. Like, my Mitochondria just don't get down like dat.  

The other thing...the littlest items seem to bring tears, sort of like Collete's quote I posted at the beginning of this entry. My 9 month old Great-Grandson's contagious gummy grin, the refrigerator art of my other youngest grandson, whose blue-painted handprint invites my own hand to cover it, to hold his hand across time and space; the infant Granddaughter named for a season that I have not seen; grandchildren in another far-flung state whose sweet voices saying "Mierme" makes the tears pool and trickle.  Pictures of my kids as little ones, so beauty-filled, so unaware of their beauty. The images of them sleeping as wee babes, so blissfully peaceful, remarkably untouched by life. Pictures of me from decades back when I was convinced I was immortal,  before crow's feet and menopause, nonchalant in my opinion that Time was a misty remote stanchion I could afford to ignore.

I view these photographs like a digitalized slide-show describing the arc of my life, my mortality clearing it's throat and tapping me on the shoulder as I watch.  I suspect all cancer patients feel this way but in honesty, I felt some of that life-underscore as a sixty-something a while before cancer ever knocked my door. 

Looking at one's life through the lens of cancer is a singular experience, however; renders the joys euphoric and the sorrows Shakespearean.

Perhaps it is a good thing to be so hyperacute about Time & Mortality, watching how it magnifies the joy of the littlest things and intensifies the Zen of the big ones.  Very much like the ellipses the earth slingshots around the sun, always closer to the life source at some part of its travels.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.