Recipes for Trouble

How are you? we ask. Busy, we reply.

The word becomes meaningless, relays nothing. Are you content with your life? What are you reading, or dreaming?

We pass one another like blurred trains.

This pace of life, the multi-tasking, the demands of work at mid-career - isolate us from on another. When I’m this busy, time moves at warp speed. When it stops, I feel lonely, as though I’ve landed at an abandoned train station.

Where did the hour go? Where did the month go? Where did everyone go?

Words, images, metaphors fly at me like birds against a plate glass window. Finding no welcome, they hover, or fly away.

The light moves me, opens my heart, fills me with longing.

Are you busy? What do you do to get off the train, if only for a moment?

We hadn’t seen each other in seven years.

I met her for the first time when I went to Ukraine in 2001. She picked me up at the airport, and took me into her home. She has my grandmother’s eyes. My grandmother, the most important family figure for me, had died just a year earlier.

She is my cousin. We hardly know each other and yet we share centuries of history, rooted in a small village in Western Ukraine. During that visit, we hung out amicably in the cafes and parks and streets of Kiev, sharing cigarettes and rich desserts, understanding each other mostly through gestures and facial expressions.

At one point she said to me, “We are like sisters.”

She was in Toronto this week for the same wedding my mom and siblings had some down for. We met up at Senses Cafe for coffee and pastry. Between her speaking Ukrainian and me speaking in a pidgin half-Ukrainian, half-English, there were awkward, yet sympathetic silences.

She was single when we met, and now she has a husband, 2 kids, another on the way. She says she lies awake at night thinking of the film career she left behind. Her eyes light up, and her words dance as we sit on the streetcar and she tells me about everything she’s seen in Toronto, the past ten days.

There’s not much about food in this post. I wanted to take her to dinner but she’s two months pregnant and can’t keep anything down. We went to some art galleries, and then walked up Spadina through the colours and smells and sounds of Chinatown and Kensington Market. (these are mostly her photos).

We ended up at my house and I showed her my last film, Flesh and Blood: A Journey between East and West, the one she’s in. She wept at the part that where her grandmother (my grandmother’s sister) appears. Her beloved Babtsia died two years after the film was made. Her mother had died just a year before. She embraced me after she saw the film, even though it’s mostly about queer themes and ideas that must have been totally foreign to her. She thanked me several times for showing her the film.

I told her about my brother’s death, six years ago now. We remembered our dead, as people from my culture do. We cried together.

No food, no alcohol and yet, somehow, we both left each other satiated. How. Did. It. Go. asked The Girlfriend warily, perhaps expecting an earful about my crazy family.

It was very…soulful, I said. It. Was. Good.

The past ten days have been full of family (hence the gap in posts!), and cooking, (and dishes!) and conversation.

That’s not something I’m generally used to (the family piece that is). Like many queers, I had to make my own family when I left home.

It’s a risky thing to do - the leaving, that is - especially when it’s an immigrant old-world community. You leave a part of yourself behind. Your family never forgives you. Mennonite poet Di Brandt wrote about her own leaving home: “You get blamed for everything but in exchange you’re granted a certain precarious outlaw freedom that is much admired and envied, as well as heartily punished.”

I have described it as being in exile.

But with age and the passing of time comes a kind of softness. My mother’s ninetieth decade confers a state of grace upon all of us. It is a gift.

Last weekend, parts of my family descended upon my city for a wedding. That also happened to be Thanksgiving weekend, so I offered to host the ritual dinner. A flurry of less-than-enthusiastic emails followed. (There’s still residual fear). I’ve never hosted a family dinner before. No one knew what to expect, least of all me.

My sister was the first to arrive, so off we went to St Lawrence Market, her to take photos as always, the camera part of her body, blinking as rapidly as her eyes, taking
everything in. I shopped frenetically: green and yellow beans, rye bread, herbs, and lovely things my ma could eat: Pates, dips, soft cheese.

My sister and I and The Girlfriend hung out that evening, fortifying ourselves with pan-seared salmon, green salad with beets and corn, and cherry tomatoes in fig-balsamic vinegar. And wine, of course. We have fun together. We laugh a lot, and do nothing extraordinary, except sit in a kitchen, being family.

The next few days were a blur of cooking and hanging out. I couldn’t mark, couldn’t write lectures; there was no way to multi-task. Time slowed down, in a gracious way. Between bouts of chopping and stirring my sister and I went for a walk in Dufferin Grove Park, warmed by a pale yellow antique light.

And them quite suddenly it seemed, my kitchen was full of family, friends and lover, and all of the aromas of Thanksgiving. I began hyperventilating. I took The Girlfriend aside. This. Is. A Very. Ambitious. Project. I said to her. What on earth was I thinking?

She laughed, and took me in her arms. I. Can’t. Believe. You. Only. Just. Figured. That. Out.

I served the first course, a smooth roasted cauliflower soup.

The table was too narrow. The wineglasses didn’t match. The turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and trimming were served, and everyone got quiet, digging in. A pot got burnt, wine got spilled. We ran out of mushroom sauce, so my brother had to go make some more. At first, no one knew what to talk about. But slowly, the conversation took a witty, then hilarious turn. Everyone got loosened up by dessert: a spicy pumpkin pie with whipped cream and maple ice wine on the side, provided by The Librarian and The Hair Dude.

My sister gave me the high five at the end of the evening. We. Did. It! she said.

My mother, more restrained, said only: That. Was. A. Very Nice. Dinner.

But I saw with my own eyes how much she loved being cooked for, how charmed she was by The Hair Dude. I saw a considerate and attentive side to my brother I’d never seen before. I saw The Librarian, whom I’ve known for fifteen years, take pleasure in meeting my mother for the first time.

The change in location, the funny mix of cultures and sexualities, created a warmth I’d never experienced before at a family dinner.

Sometimes you have to leave home, to come home.

It was a weekend of luminous colour, and gilded autumn light.

The last picnic of the year was also the simplest: Monforte and cheddar cheses, baguette, and sweet pickle relish from Prince Edward County that cost us all of two dollars, several weeks ago.

Pumpkins glowed in the fields, and children romped in a pumpkin display while parents took pictures destined for family blogs and Christmas cards.

We went for a hike along the Bruce Trail in the Hockley Valley, and walked past a jade green pond with a tree like a fish spine.

The trail climbed gently to a stunning view of the valley painted in primary colours. Clouds created a play of light and shadow. We were as far from work and stress as we could possibely be.