Goodbye to Him

He was gone by Monday evening.  He was determined to die in his own way, and it's been understood by us all that it had to happen.  It's always inevitable, isn't it?  The way seasons come in confused rushes, the way you're never quite nostalgic enough to move back home.  He died on his bed with his family next to him, with his breathing heavy, then soft, then not at all.  He panted and looked my mother right in the eyes, probably apologizing.  Probably wanting her to hold him tight through it all. The last picture I took of him. Two years ago, on a polaroid.

My childhood dog died.  His name was Charlie, he passed away of natural causes.  He was fourteen and my family had him since I was nine.  Three months before my brother had cancer, a year before I started middle school, a decade before I left for college.  I thought he was a girl at first, so delicate and beautiful.  He was bought in the rain and was scared of the thunder.  He was special, different than our dog, Humphrey.  He was needy and my sister would dress him up in baby doll clothes.  She painted his nails.  He ate a library book and a hundred dollar bill once.  He had a developmental disorder where we had to baby-talk to him for years and years, so he felt safe and understood we loved him.  He had a scratch under his right eye where it always cried a little.  He was beautiful, strong.  He was afraid of the basement and never went in there.  Not even when there was a storm and the television said to go somewhere safe.  He refused, that stubborn dog.

He one time starved himself to bones when we left him at a kennel, when we went to Florida for a week.  We were charged $200 to fix the fence he broke trying to find us.

He one time starved himself when Humphrey died, too depressed to play ball.

He loved the snow and even when he was arthritic, he still jumped head-first into the first fall of December.

He was special, he was different.  He was delicate like a girl dog.  Beautiful in his own way.  He was blonde, he shed a lot.   He didn't know any tricks.  He was stubborn.  He was perfect the way all dogs are perfect and special the way the small quirks of age make you special.

He was home to me, but he had creaks in him, too.  He stumbled, he fell.  He growled if you touched him when he was sleeping.  He would kiss your hand, then ignore you.  He couldn't walk down steps, so they built him a ramp to go outside.  He couldn't walk up steps, so my parents moved their bedroom into the library on the first floor.  Every morning, my mom would walk him around our fenced-in yard, the whole circumference so Charlie could smell and hear and remember he was still loved.

He died in his sleep, he wanted it to happen.  He panted, then slowly let go.  He lived for fourteen years, and it was greedy to ask for any more.

My mother called me the other day and said she was lost in the mornings, with more free time.  She said she wasn't going to get anymore dogs.  She said they would move the bedroom back upstairs when it didn't hurt so bad.  She said she's waiting for a sign that he's happy now.  I asked her what the sign would be and she said it was too soon to know.  She'll know when she sees it.

I don't think the dreams I've been having are a sign that he's happy.  I keep dreaming he's in pain, that we had to make the choice ourselves.  I dream about being a senior in high school and holding onto Humphrey as we put him down.  I remember crying until I threw up.  And I wonder why I haven't cried this week.  Why Charlie was different.  I'm waiting for a sign now, too.  To know it's okay that I haven't cried yet.  And when that sign comes, I hope this dam inside me breaks.

Equinox.

There are cold sweats at night and hot coffee by morning.  It's never enough to say "enough".  Disappointments, like weeds, grow tenfold when you cut then down to the nub.  Down to the quick, where it hurts in the white part.  Sometimes I bite my nails when I'm going 80 on the highway.  Sometimes I'm moody to the point of tempestuous.  Sometimes I think of the old farmhouse where I grew up and can't remember what my room looked like as a kid. My life is halved like an apple, quartered like a treasonous man.  Dragged on the back of horses, pieces of me left in all cardinal directions.  There was only pre-California and post-California.  And now there is only California.  And maybe that's all there has ever been, the confusing realization that time moves languid when you want it to speed up.  You close your eyes and you're 23 and not who you thought you'd be.  The bits of synchronistic twang to your voice when you call your mother fades when you order dinner.  The dog hair I found on a sweater last week was not from the fourteen-year-old lab I grew up with.  It's the realization that who you are now is who you'll be forever and these relics of age and memory somehow clashed.  A little more Big Sur, a little less Appalachia.

The two years I've lived in California haven't seemed that long at all.  It's due to the stagnation of perfect weather.  The dry summers, the fog-colored mornings when the light refracts on silky palm leaves.  It somehow mummified my senses.  I've lived in a sarcophagus of privilege.  The summers can trick you into thinking you're happy, you're at peace.  It makes you drowsy to the point of opiated calmness.  It's only here that I've experienced this effect.  Here, where the weather never changes.

In Pennsylvania, life is marked by natural disasters.  Things insurance doesn't cover.  Floods that come from mountaintops, drowning any cornfields near your schoolyard.  Snow storms that caused your mother to slip and break her tailbone.  "The Summer after that big storm..." was my graduation date.  "That one Spring when the tree broke in half..." was when my grandfather died.  Life is punctuated by nature, and nature is constant, dynamic shifting of lunar phases and cloud formations.

But in California, it's quiet at night.  It doesn't rain.  It just gets hotter and cooler, variations of the same eternal summer.  It can be a stifling feeling to never know when the storm comes and the clouds all look like shapes from your childhood.  Here, you never have any way to keep track of time.  Clocks lie.  What says an hour can feel like three in a fight.  A month can shed its skin and stretch to be sixty days instead of thirty.  Time is perspective in California.  Happiness is all perspective, too.  I can see why Eve ate the apple.

On our nightly dog walks, we find small pomegranates instead.

These are the reasons I miss the fall, the liminal seasons before and after the Persphonic bookends of the year--summer and winter.  When there's nothing but continuity, there's no way to reflect on two whole years of my life.  Fall means a time of transition, evidence of change.  It's up to me to decide if that means progress.  I lose sight of the small victories when there's nothing but sunshine.

So I made this apple tart.  A "rustic apple tart", as Leite's Culinaria called it.  I thought about every autumnal  mid-afternoon when I'd come home to a pumpkin pie or a lit candle.  My mother had made my bed and kept the window opened, just to keep it as crisp-smelling as possible.  I made this tart and blushed at how simple it was.  I made this tart and called my mom, because what else can you do when you're wondering if she remembers things the way you do.

Leite's Culinaria Rustic Apple tart

Midweek

Time is the trickster god.  A coyote that laugh-howls, lopes into your nightmares, tricks the Snake.  The booming thunder of God-fury, the small church mice that follow the corn harvest like a perennial migration. All of it, everything.  The Bible doesn't mention the creation of time, it could have been the first or the sixth day of manifested divinity. Between the firmament and the sea, deep in the root-veins of the universe.  We live in the world of cause-and-effect, and the only protection of this stifling reality is perception.  My mother said her candy shop was getting too commercial.  My mother said her back hurt so bad she couldn't breathe that morning.  My mother said that if she could tell her seventeen-year-old self to get an education, she wouldn't be "in this hell-hole town" now. And I understood.  I didn't know who I was at seventeen and I was headstrong and coming into a sexuality that was too strong for me to divert.  I was creative in a static way, post-it notes of lyrical sentences, nonsensical until it was in a poem.  I majored in English, a dead degree.  I second-majored in Philosophy, a dead science. And now I work with tension and dream of cooking every day.  I dream that the window is open, the sun highlighting dust motes I'll get to one day.  The dogs dance their carnal dance of play-fight and Nolan sits waiting for me. And I have that life in part-time.

My weekend is Tuesday and Wednesday and after working for days on end, skipping weekends to help out in the office, I finally had two days off in a row.  After dental appointments and job applications, I got the chance to reconnect.  The mornings, grey and amber the way mornings are, were punctuated by small kisses and coffee that cut the cold, silent air with the sizzle of the pot when it went back on the burner.  My shoulders fell, relaxed.  My heart relaxed, grateful.  We put a deposit on a new house and felt the promise of a new life, a new us.  A way to forget the time I yelled so loud my throat hurt, a chance to forget that every cause has an effect, because we live in a world of time.  And sometimes those things don't leave you.

Wednesday night, I made a cake.  I made a cake and planned my future.  I made a cake and recreated a dish we had in Newport last week.  And the small jewels of heirloom tomatoes and the beads of sweat that dotted Nolan's shirt told me how alive I am, how I don't regret who I was at seventeen, because my poetry is different now, but it's still there in the periphery.

Making the Almond-Meringue cake. TheDriftwoodJournals

Almond Meringue Cake with Clover Honey-Vanilla Icing

Ingredients:

For the cake:

  • 1 1/2 Teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 2/3 cup flour
  • 2/3 cup finely-ground almonds (I used a food processor for a 6 oz bag of plain almonds)
  • 1 Teaspoon salt
  • 1 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 1/2 cup olive oil
  • 2 ounces soft butter
  • 2 large eggs, separated
  • 1 Teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 Teaspoon almond
  • 1/2 Tablespoon white vinegar
  • 1 1/4 cup buttermilk
  • 1/2 Teaspoon cream of tartar (optional, but recommended)

For the icing:

  • 1 cup confectioner's sugar
  • 1 Teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 Tablespoon
  • 1 Tablespoon clover honey

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, Fahrenheit
  2. Put a metal bowl and whisk or hand beaters' whisks into freezer to cool while you prep.
  3. Prepare an 8-inch cake pan by liberally coating with softened butter and parchment paper
  4. For the cake, sift flour, soda, ground almonds, salt, and sugar in a large mixing bowl.  Mix together.  Set aside.
  5. In a glass measuring cup or separate mixing bowl, combine oil, egg yolks, extracts, vinegar, and buttermilk by whisking until yolks are broken up.
  6. Combine wet ingredients with dry in thirds.  After each portion, beat with hand or stand mixer for 20 seconds or so to combine thoroughly.  Set this batter aside.
  7. Take bowl and whisk out of freezer, and beat egg whites until peaks form.  Add cream of tartar and continue to beat until stiff peaks form.
  8. To combine meringue with batter mixture, use a rubber spatula and take a small amount of the egg whites and stir them into the batter.  Now, pour all egg whites into batter bowl and fold gently until just combined.
  9. Pour into prepared cake pan.
  10. Bake for 45 minutes and watch carefully.  The top will be browned, and the center will not be fully cooked.  To ensure nothing is burnt, put aluminum foil over cake after 45 minutes and continue to bake until middle is set and a toothpick comes out clean.  Check in five minute intervals to ensure best quality.
  11. Invert cake and cool completely.
  12. While cake is cooling, prepare icing by adding all ingredients in a bowl and mixing together.  Add warm water by the tablespoon and whisk vigorously until desired consistency.  Drizzle over cooled cake.  Enjoy!

Got to love a cake that has olive oil, egg whites, and buttermilk!