december 15

dinner list

So there's been this list on my fridge to remind me of dinners I can make throughout the week. There's this system I sometimes follow where I pick some recipes, buy groceries based on the ingredients I need, then make a list so I don't have to think about what to make for dinner after I come home from a 12 hour work day too tired to even make dinner, but, you gotta eat, right?

So this list has been there for a while and it's dated 9/10. The first night of that week, Monday, we were to have pad thai with cucumber salad. I think we did. I learned to make a decent version of pad thai this summer. It has lots of carrots.

The second night, Tuesday, we were to have pasta with sausage and green salad. We didn't have that. I remember I did cook the sausage, fried it in my little Calphalon frying pan, and that we ate it while we sat in the bedroom staring at the TV. I think we also had wine. No, I'm sure we had wine that night.

The rest of that week we were supposed to have: veggie stir-fry with tofu, spicy carrot soup with rice and cucumber salad (another dish I learned to make this summer), and chicken stir-fry with steamed veggies.

I know that we spent the rest of the week at Bink's eating pizza and driking beer and smoking. I'm sure all those cucumbers went bad and I had to throw them out. The carrots probably went flacid and had to be chucked, too.

I haven't wanted to throw this list out and I'm not sure why. Maybe because this is the last thing that I haven't gotten back together since then--having some sort of system for making nutritous food. I've got the breakfast and lunch thing down, but not dinner. It also doesn't help that A* has been out of town so much and I've been living on mac and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with chardonney for dinner.

This list represents a simpler, more predictable time for me. If you'd asked me on 9/10 if I thought my life was simple and predictable I'd have laughed in your face. And really, this life of mine isn't all that different. Except that I cry a little every day. I keep wondering when that won't happen anymore.

Today I read A* the bio of the man from Ghana who came to the US and worked as a taxi driver and then got a BA and then an MA and was the best auditor in his office. And he bought himself another taxi, after all these years, because he liked driving a taxi and wanted to get back into it on the weekends. It was his hobby.

And I don't like crying, not even in front of my husband (unless he's done something mean to me), and I couldn't keep my lip from quivering when I read him that story. I don't know why the fact that this man still wanted to drive his taxi after all these years and all he'd accomplished got to me like that, but it did.

And it's these things, along with all the other permanent reminders, that make me see that this will always be here and it makes me not want to throw away that list. Because this little scrap of paper represents the dinners we had, and then didn't have, and it makes me think of all the dinners that people didn't have after that day. Or something. I'm not sure. Maybe it's stupid. Maybe I'm being overly sentimental and dramatic. I don't know. Maybe it will be come clearer later why I can't throw this list away.

- december 15