A writing companian

Every morning in front of my computer this exchange is taking place. Me, serious and driven pouring my 'oh so important thoughts onto the computer 'and she just as driven walking back and forth stepping gently on the keyboard sending herds of letters scrambling on the screen mingling with my orderly sentences.
First I get mad.
"Don't you see, you are as usual a disturbance."
Than I try to work around her realizing as I am doing it how pathetic this might look to any bystander. I try to get to the keys by sending my hand under her belly or see the screen above her ears and just as I find a somewhat workable position she moves and graciously send a paw or a tail and brush it all away. At the end I give up. I laugh and pet her on the head "you are right," I tell her "I am taking myself way too seriously."
I brush the clamps of hair from my shirt, phoo away some more fine hair stuck to my face, and lean back.
She stretches slowly, yawn, get up and walk away.

Explosions

And other times I am bursting with ideas. My hands are flowing on the keyboard and I watch them with admiration trying to match the flow . Colors and shapes are spreading on the screen and I can see how the vivid picture is almost, almost there.

Images

some days it is all so blurry and I have to squint hard to see the form through the blur. I push aside unwanted images and thoughts that don't accumulate to anything. I go here, I go there, but feel like treading water. My legs so heavy as I try to pick them up, my breath so forced, and hard and my ideas swim away just as I think that I am getting closer and about to finally catch them.

Time to write

Finding the time, finding my own time, my writing cycle, when is my writing at its best.
I do it best in the mornings, as I wake up. From the shower with my cup of coffee I power the computer and ignoring everything else grant myself few precious moments of 'me'.
It's usually works like magic. I often find that while I was asleep my mind did some extra work and as my fingers hit the keys thoughts I was not aware of pour out onto the screen.
It could be that, it could be the warm shower water or the steaming coffee but mornings are without a question my time to write.

Don't ever forget

Those black and white pictures, old memories etched in paper,so fragile. Images of places long gone and people that soon will be forgotten, What isn't remembered is as good as dead.

memories

Just finished unpacking my house of over twenty years, what a strange experience. We did not live in it for the past ten years so opening the door to the room, where all our belonging were stored, such a long time ago, was literally walking back into the past.

A wall to ceiling boxes taped shut and labeled very hurriedly, and somewhat carelessly, with titles like 'stuff' or' miscellaneous'. This was an enormous task that had to be finished within a month and watered down to only few boxes of real valuables.

What is valuable is not a small question to answer. Is it my daughters' baby clothes that I kept all those years, so small and crumbled and yellowing? Or maybe the boxes and boxes of toys and plush animals, so dear to our hearts at the time. And my books, so many books, collected with much love over the years.

"You don't need the physical evidence of something that you really like" I tell myself firmly in an effort to quiet the voices screaming "no...Don’t throw me!!!"

Pictures, how can I throw away pictures? My old diaries, my kids’ birthday cards to me, their notebooks from first grade, and their drawings from kindergarten. I keep moving the boxes from here to there, piling items in neat little piles and then pulling them out, I even catch myself arranging them back on shelves for the new people. I know I can't take them all, I know I can't leave them either, don't they have a soul, part of my soul?

More on humor/ my mother's cooking

My mothers’ kitchen

 

 

Until the day I met my husband I was convinced that my mother was an excellent cook. Our culinary menu at home was a mixture of Austrian and Hungarian dishes, she brought from her parent’s home, combined with new inventions she introduced continuously. If there’s anything, I learned from her about cooking is not to be intimidated by new tastes, colors and unique food combinations.

That was also the common view in my extended family. Whenever my aunts, uncles and cousins came to visit they all marveled at her cooking, and baking, but mostly her sense of innovation and boldness at trying new things.

I have some fond memories of helping her creating her dishes, rolling out and cutting the dough for a special dish she made of boiled dumplings, dipped in bread crumbs and sugar. Filling Hanukkah donuts with sweet red jelly, sweet cheese balls, and my all time favorite, a spicy cheese dip I could never reconstruct in later years, even though I have the exact recipe in my hands.

My husband came from the US and his favorite all time story is how he always thought, until he came to Israel, that vegetables came from a can. Yet he had the audacity to vocally and outwardly dislike my mothers’ cooking and declare it not appetizing and odd.

When we got married, I had to make a choice. And following the words of the bible (Genesis 2:24)” Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall join to his wife…” I believed that as a devoted wife, I too had the duty to stick with him and accept his taste in food. But being my mother daughter I still felt some loyalty, and deep fondness, to her cooking and the home flavors.

Over the years I gradually reintroduced back my childhood favorite dishes, some with my own minor modifications, to make them more palatable, to my own family. It turned out to be a success, not only did my husband learn to like many of them, they become a constant part of our menu to the point that my own daughters, now living independently, call me for instructions on how to prepare certain dishes, or ask me to make them on their visits home.

And so even though my husband keeps repeating the old script, in family gathering, how my mother couldn’t cook, the cold facts are that he eats my dishes, which are really her dishes. I wonder what my mother will say if she would still be with us and it makes me smile. So often things are not what they seem, and our food connection is just one small proof.