a previous night’s gentle dinner: ginger sardine rice, recipe from HappyDonabeLife.com
Last night Deni and I made a freezer dinner. Frozen udon, various frozen fish cakes, bok choy, and a hard-boiled egg in a dashi broth made from a sachet. We’d been careful with each other through the evening, standing in front of the stove side by side, leaning in to each other while waiting for the various small pots to come to a boil. We brought our overflowing bowls to the table, sat down, and the dinner was so quiet, even the cooking of it lacked the hurried handling of fire and need for precise timing I’m used to when I cook Chinese food. The broth was pared down, stripped of the usual tongue-grabbing flavors in my favorite packaged ramen.
And when I finally picked up my chopsticks to eat, I was overcome. After the first chubby tear pushed its way through I let the rest fall. Big drops that didn’t seem to roll down my face so much as they leapt out of me. Deni could have turned away from me but instead put their hand on my back. We talked about how everything was delicious. Everything is changing so quickly. A soft meal for us now means more than cozy nourishment. It feels like relinquishment, acceptance.
A few years ago after overcoming a life-defining schism, I had the hubris to think I was done. I’d figured out everything I needed, big questions had all been sorted, my only task left was to live and breathe and enjoy. And maybe it still is. But not without some more change first.
My job is also ending, and total strangers seem to have as many feelings about the change as might I, a person who’s about to lose my income and health insurance and my professional home and nourishing daily community. I understand that everyone has their own relationship to everything and for five days a week it’s my job to make room for theirs–to receive others’ feelings, comfort the givers, and, an expectation I put on myself, send the person off with at least a little bit of kindness.
“Think of it as the seasons changing,” I told Carol today. She’s a longtime customer and had only just heard the news. “No one called me!” she only half-joked as she walked straight to me in from the sidewalk. “This is such upsetting news.”
I’d the benefit of being able to reference autumn’s actual arrival in town after this deadening summer. “The leaves turn, they’ll fall from the branches, winter will be hard, but something new will come,” I offered. I’d gone swimming before work, and credit it with giving me either the equanimity or lightheadedness to respond this way.
Later, George, one of my favorites, stopped in. He’d been exposed to someone who turned out to have received a false-positive Covid test and even with his own negative Covid test was not allowed to return to work. He was attempting to enjoy a forced day off but his job, which hadn’t been able to update their records in time, was also going to dock him a sick day. I chided him for being too good a capitalist, being unable to relish a day not in service of work, but then also wagered that with the calendar year nearly done he’d probably had some sick days to spare. Ah, but no, his funding is tied to the fiscal year, so he’s actually got to make his sick days last until next summer. We teased each other, cowed as we both were and still trying to resist capitalism, and then I sent him off. He’ll be back soon though, we’ll get to chat.
Last week he and I exchanged contact info with each other, something I’ve been doing with customers more and more in the last few weeks. As it is I’ve run in to favorite customers out in the world on my off days, I’ve introduced them to my non-shop friends. Several people I now count among my dearest loves started out first as customers; we’re close enough now that I think of them as friends first, part of the shop constellation second.
If we’re lucky, which is to say, if we work hard enough at it, we’ll get a chance to know each other in a new and different way. George and me and my work and New York and Deni and my family and and and and.