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I had planned to get a jump on the inevitable New Year’s resolution yawping by contrasting last week’s bacchanal with this week’s austerity: the beef dripping-soaked Yorkshire pud replaced by chai soba and seaweed; no more cream in the coffee my mom brought back as a Christmas present for Lloyd; the metric ton of Christmas cookies I ate over the weekend replaced by three, count ‘em, three simultaneous cups of tea which are not doing the trick because I want some goddamn cookies already. (I decided to have a little fun with my tea, and made myself a cup of green tea, a cup of chamomile and a cup of Red Zinger. “Look,” I said to my friend E. “It’s like a stoplight.” She gave me a brilliant, frozen smile and backed away from my desk, muttering that old standby about she needs to get a new job because Jen has finally gone freakin’ insane.) I will probably yawp about these very things over the next few days - and no, I will not take offense if you decide to consider this as fair warning, and go somewhere else for a few days until I’m done talking about seaweed - but tonight, thanks to the lovely bunni, I am going to switch gears.

Bunni and I both received David Sedaris’s Live at Carnegie Hall for Christmas. The first reading is his story “Repeat After Me,” in which he mentions that his sister Lisa is convinced that anything can kill you. Because she retains the alarmist headlines from the local news, but none of the information in the actual broadcast, Lisa believes that applesauce can kill you, but she forgets that in order to do this, it must be injected intravenously. Bunni’s grandmother is cut from much the same cloth. So is mine. Or, at least, she was.

Neddie is my mother’s mother, the wife of my late and much-missed grandfather. Because she was young when my mom was born, and because Mom was young when I was born, we have had a lot of time together, and that time has been a lot of fun. When I came to visit her, we never had to ask each other twice if we wanted to go to the mall. She was not exactly a cook or a baker, but she had her dishes (pot roast, lasagne, a really fine dark chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream), and the dishes she had, she did well. She used to bicker with my grandpop, good-naturedly but bickering nonetheless, that was the best entertainment in town. (Once when I was about 7 or 8, they were having words because she was trying to get him to take his blood pressure medication while he was trying to play computer chess. “I don’t want you making mistakes with your medicine,” she said. “Mistakes? Let’s talk about mistakes,” said Daddy Joe. “I made the biggest mistake of my life on September 19, 1941.” There was silence from the kitchen. I recognized September 19 as their wedding anniversary, and I thought, oh god, she’s going to kill him. After a beat, she yelled back, “1942!”, which was, of course, their actual anniversary. I nearly laughed my iced tea out my nose.)

Neddie was fun. She was also a worrier. As my mom said, “Anything that was the least bit fun, she knew someone who had died from it.” Walking to the corner store. Hayrides at the apple orchard in Bucks County. Learning to ride a bike. Moving to New York. It was all fraught with peril for her.

In her defense, she had received an early, harsh lesson in the perils of life: when she was a child, one of her brothers had died at the age of 3. He had been ill, was hospitalized and apparently made a full recovery. Her parents were told, essentially, you can pick up your son at the hospital on Friday afternoon, and when they went to pick him up, he was dead, having suffered a sudden, violent relapse. I can’t imagine the kind of grief and shock that Neddie and her parents and other brother suffered, but because my great-grandparents were stoics, and didn’t believe in any form of psychiatric help or grief counseling at all, my grandmother was left believing that life was chaos, the world was chaos, and you fought chaos by controlling anything you could, and getting overwhelmingly frustrated by what you could not. This had repercussions, for my grandfather, for my mom and her brothers, and, eventually, for me, my brother and our cousins.

Knowing what I know about Grandmom’s little brother, I can feel sympathy for her, but her fretting still drove us nuts for years. “Make sure you don’t carry your bag on one shoulder like that,” she used to admonish me. “Cross it over to your other shoulder, so that robbers can’t steal your bag.” She told the same thing to my brother when he started carrying a briefcase with a shoulder strap. He told her that that just meant that a potential robber could still still his briefcase, with the added benefit of breaking his neck, and then she really worried. When I moved to New York, she told my mom, without a trace of irony, “I really think it would be safest if Jenny just didn’t leave her apartment after dark.” Mom nearly swallowed her own tongue, trying to contemplate telling a 21-year-old living in Manhattan, “your grandmom doesn’t want you out after dark.” I thought it was a great idea because it meant that in winter, I would have to leave my office at 3:30 in the afternoon.

When I moved to Philadelphia and acquired a live-in fiance, my mom (who was thrilled with this arrangement because she was nuts about Lloyd) phoned my grandmom. “How’s Jenny?” said Grandmom.

“Fine,” said my mother with trepidation. “Still in the same apartment. Uh, Lloyd has moved in with her.” She winced and waited for the outrage.

“Oh, thank God,” said Neddie. “I’ve been so worried about her, living alone in that city. Thank God she’s not living alone in that apartment.”

“WAIT A MINUTE!,” said Mom, who knew that if it had been her, shacking up outside of the bonds of matrimony, Neddie’s response would not have been “oh, thank God.”

“It’s Neddie logic,” said Aunt Nan, my mom’s best friend, who knew it well.

Neddie logic failed her at least once, though; of course, since it’s Neddie logic and only she can understand it, maybe it worked in some mysterious way that only she can see, the way my believer friends tell me that God works.  I am speaking specifically of September 11, 2001.  I will not rehash the specific horrors of that day, or of the days that followed.  I will just say that once the phone lines started to free up, I was on the phone for two solid days, with parents, friends in England, friends in New Zealand, friends all over the U.S., co-workers, corporate weasels from LuthorCorp who were surprised, and a little put out, to discover that I was not at my desk on September 12 (one of them had the nerve to tell me, “now, Jen, you know that a work-at-home day means just that").  After the 203rd phone call in two days to my mom, it hit me that I’d never called Grandmom to let her know that Lloyd and I were okay.  Oh, lord, I thought to myself, Neddie has to be going absolutely batshit.  I called Mom back immediately.

“I knew there was something I forgot to tell you,” Mom said.  “You’re going to love this.” It turns out that Neddie, who lived in front of CNN 24/7 at the time, saw everything, basically thought, “oh, how terrible,” as if she were watching footage of a distant plane wreck in the Russian steppes, and then drove to her local Genuardi’s to do groceries for the week.  Mom reached her on the phone when she got back.  It was obvious that Mom had been crying.  Neddie’s response was a surprised, “why, what are you so upset about?”

“Uh, Mom,” said my mom, “did you see the news?  Did you know there was a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center?  And on the Pentagon?”

“Oh, yes,” said Neddie.  “I saw that, and I thought, ‘oh, that’s terrible’ [which in Philadelphia-speak is pronounced ‘turble’], and then I went to Genuardi’s and did my shopping.”

“Mom,” said Mom patiently, “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about, because they both work miles away, but I haven’t heard from Jenny or Lloyd yet.”

“Oh, well, when you do hear from them, just let me know.”

I am still trying to figure out the logic whereby living alone is a virtual death warrant, but being in Manhattan during a terrorist attack is no big shakes.  I really don’t care, though, because I laughed my first laugh in days when I heard that story.  I am laughing now at the thought of it.

Neddie now has mid-stage Alzheimer’s and lives in a locked Alzheimer’s ward in the retirement community she and Grandpop moved to after selling their house 10 years ago. She still worries, but because she has lost a lot of memory about who we all are, where we live and what we do, she worries less about us, and more about running out of money (she will not, thanks to my grandfather’s savvy investing), paying her bills (my mom takes care of the bills), and wondering why all of her mail has been forwarded to Mom’s house (so Mom can get the bills on time). Mom told her that she needs to stop making herself sick with worry, and Neddie replied, “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t worry about something.” This makes me heartsick, and it fills me with a seasonally-appropriate resolve: All of the worrying that I do, it is not an amusing personality quirk, it is a drain on my energy, and I have to cut it off at the knees.  Since Neddie could not, and still cannot, I will.

December 21 marks what would have been my grandfather’s 83rd birthday.  He died on October 25, one month after the last time I saw him, two weeks after my brother’s wedding, the day before my brother and sister-in-law returned from their honeymoon.

There is a theory floating around the conventional wisdom ether that when we meet someone, we keep their age at meeting as a fixed reference point.  I know it holds true for me.  Lloyd, in my life for almost 12 years, will always be 30—no, make that 27, because even though he was on the cusp of his 31st birthday, he didn’t look a day over 27.  Lloyd cheats time in a way my friends envy.  It is why my mom will always be as a child bride to me, young and stunning.  And because I have early baby memories of living in my grandparents’ house, lying in a crib while my grandmom yelled at my teenage uncles to turn down the Frank Zappa record so that the baby could sleep, my grandfather is fixed in my mind as he was at 48.  It is why I’m always surprised when people ask me how old he was when he died, and I say 82, and everyone acknowledges that yes, it’s a shame, but 82 is not really considered too young to die.  I certainly thought he was too young to die.

He had been ill over the past four years, two go-arounds with colon cancer, surgery after surgery after surgery, getting thinner and frailer after each one, but he always bounced back, always.  It got to be like clockwork, a biorhythm:  now he is ill, now he is fine. My brother and I always secretly suspected that Grandpop would outlive all of us, that as long as there was something interesting for him to do on this earth, he wasn’t going anywhere.  He had plenty of interesting things to do: playing his guitars, acoustic and electric, with his friends; his watercolors; his woodworking; shooting pool with his pool buddies; teaching the other residents of his retirement community how to go online (his imitations of his more technophobic peers were cruel but funny).  The Wednesday before he died, my mom called to say that the “minor” heart surgery (his doctor’s words, not ours, as if there were such a thing as minor heart surgery on an 82-year-old man) he’d just had did not fix the “minor” problem of fluid around his heart, which was not fluid but some mysterious muscle inflammation that his doctors couldn’t fix, and that his heart was beating at 15% capacity.  Because I ached to make my mom feel better, I resorted to that last refuge of fools, mindless optimism.  “It looks awful now,” I said to my mom, “but he’s had much worse than this, and he always bounces back.” “I don’t think he’s going to bounce back this time,” said Mom, and even as I quieted down and listened to what she had to tell me, I thought, by Christmas we’ll all be laughing at this.  Thinking of this now makes me curl up inside, shrimp-like, with shame.

Everybody has at least one story in them, and my grandfather had dozens.  I am almost full to bursting with the urge to tell them:  how he was a technical sergeant in the Army Air Corps during World War II, on the ground crew of the Mission Belle, which flew 148 successful missions before being shot down on the 149th.  How he never told war stories, never bragged about battle, but did have fond memories of furlough travels through France and England.  How he had little patience with the lionization of elite fighting units—he believed that in the heat of battle, the people shooting at you don’t care whether or not you belong to an elite unit—and how irritated he was by the success of Top Gun.  How he took an instant liking to my best friend and her RAF firefighter husband when they came over for my wedding, and how we all longed to get him back to England, source of happy memories that had fed him for 50 years.  How crazy he was about the girl he married right before shipping off to Europe—no shock there, as my grandmother was so beautiful, movie-star beautiful, Gene Tierney beautiful, Vivien Leigh beautiful.  How after he came home, he went to work for Bell Telephone, the safest job you could have, a sure bet; once Ma Bell said yes to you, she said yes for life, or at least until you were ready to retire with your full pension that would never ever be touched by raiders; but he decided that there was more to life than safety, and he left the safest gig in the world to start his own business.  How he was able to sell that business when he was ready to retire.  How he was a careful but smart investor.  How he decided to learn how to do magic tricks in his 50’s, as an easy way to keep us amused, and how he applied himself to the task with the same singlemindedness he brought to everything he did.  How he loved his family, and how we loved him back, but more telling, how he liked us, and we liked him, how we always looked forward to a visit from my grandparents because we knew that the next two hours, or two days, would be filled with interesting and funny conversation.  How there are easily more stories to tell, how my mom and I wanted to tell them at his wake, but we didn’t, because most of them were off-color.  How I’m not going to tell them this year, or at least not tonight, because I honestly thought he would be here for this birthday, this Christmas, and I am furious at the universe because he is not.

Here is the poem, courtesy of Stephen Spender, that I read at his wake:

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

Although it doesn’t happen much anymore, one of the most frequent topics of “you know what you should do?” conversation was the one on which I solicited the least advice: dieting. I never knew whether it was because I was, once upon a time, an easy and obvious candidate for weight loss, being much more of a muchacha than I am now, or whether diet regimes are so embedded in the landscape that it has become expected of all of us. I will never forget the look on Lloyd’s face when I told him that a friend and co-worker, a stunning 23-year-old Taiwanese woman, already a hardcore gym rat, decided to go on Atkins. At least in New York, or at least in the circles in which I work, there is an idea that it is somewhat immoral not to be on something. If you are not in need of dimunition, then maybe you need to do something about your triglycerides, or your HDL/LDL ratios, or your insulin resistance, or maybe all of these are fine but you want to know how to make them better.

In my case, though, no one would have looked twice at me if I announced that I was going on Atkins, because once upon a time there was much more to this bakerina than meets the eye. (There also used to be less than meets the eye, but that is for once and future times.) What garnered looks was my polite thanks for the advice, but no thanks, I’ll figure it out for myself. I could see the unspoken assumption in their eyes: but wasn’t it figuring it out for yourself that got you fat in the first place, dear? Depending on the receptiveness of the friend in question, I would explain that I had spent years taking similar advice from people who knew the trick, who had the key, and all I needed to do was follow their path. I spent years on Pritikin and Atkins and Stillman and a particularly wiggy diet by a particularly wiggy female bariatrician who was famous in the late 70’s/early 80’s, a woman who regularly wrote diets for Teen magazine and counseled us that there was no reason for a fat teenager to eat more than 850 calories a day. I tried Weight Watchers, safest of the bunch, which gave me an excuse to obsess over every blessed thing that went into my mouth. I even tried a regime of, shall we say, disordered eating, the kind favored by ancient sybarites and frightened college girls. I was rewarded for my efforts by losing 5 pounds, then gaining a minimum of 10, yearly, for 10 years. You can do the math.

In the end I decided that I couldn’t do any worse for myself than I had allowed the experts to do for me, so I started making sneaky little changes, the kind where every time you find yourself with a craving for stale candy from a vending machine, you force yourself to have a cup of tea instead. (The stale candy habit is gone, but now I have a wicked tea habit.) Last February, when I suspected that I was pregnant, I started eating a lot of broccoli and craving foods with a lot of sesame in them, like hummus and halvah. The pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm, but the broc habit stayed, and I remain staggered by how much halvah I can put away. Most importantly, though, I decided that I was not going to cut anything out. More vegetables? Why, yes, thank you. Lean meats? Mais oui, bien sur. But I am not going to panic if I go to Zarela for dinner and the gallon of mole sauce her chef made that afternoon contains a teaspoon of lard in it. I will give up the stale vending-machine chocolate, but if someone offers me a brown-butter-flavored ganache from La Maison du Chocolat, I am going to thank that person profusely, and possibly plant an open-mouth kiss on him/her. And I am not, not, not going to give up starches.

Yes, I know that you lost 50 pounds. I know that you have more energy. I know that our ancestors were hunter/gatherers, more suited to hunting mastodons than cultivating grain. I have heard it all, and I’m glad that it works for you, but if you tell me one more time that our wee baby little intestinal tracts were not designed to eat that big bad bowl of oatmeal, I am taking that oatmeal, and the little pitcher of heavy cream and the brown sugar and the wee dram of Macallan 18 that accompanies every proper bowl of oatmeal in my house, and I am going home. And before you make some well-meaning comment about how much faster I would get thinner if I just gave up all of that oatmeal and millet and amaranth and barley and polenta on which I warm up during the winter, let me remind you that there was 37 pounds more of me to tell this to when I did it your way. Pardon me while I add one more dram of Macallan 18 to my oatmeal.

If you are not a fan of oats but you still like the idea of a hot breakfast to power you through a cold morning, any good cookbook on grains can give you instructions on how to cook them and what to serve on/in/with them.  One of the best is Mollie Katzen’s Sunlight Cafe.  It is an all-purpose breakfast cookbook, filled with recipes for eggs and potatoes and breakfast puddings and pancakes and waffles and muffins, but for me the crowning glory is the comprehensive grains chapter, filled with clear, friendly instructions on how to cook and serve them.  One of my new breakfast staples is amaranth wafers, made by patting cooked amaranth into silver dollars and pan-frying them at a high temperature in high-oleic safflower oil.  Because the oil can be heated to high temperatures without smoking, the wafers stay crisp even at room temperature.  Lloyd likes his as a sweet, with maple syrup.  I prefer mine savory, with tiny dabs of sour cream and a little Maldon salt.  There are recipes for oatmeal cooked in sweetened milk with chai spices, couscous with dried fruit and yogurt, barley cooked in apple juice, and my very favorite, Orange-Pecan Skillet Millet, made by cooking millet risotto-style in vanilla-spiked orange juice.  I love it like mad, and Lloyd does too, even though every time I make it, he crows “who’s a pretty boy?” in a spookily-accurate parrot voice.

If you are a fan of oats, you may want to try to procure a copy of this.  It is out of print, but copies pop up here and there.  I got mine from my home away from home, Kitchen Arts & Letters (212-876-5550).  If you buy it, be prepared:  People will look at you oddly, wondering at you as you chuckle over this little book of whimsy.  Let them look.  You and I know good stuff when we see it.

Today Julie Powell announced the official closing of the Julie/Julia Project.  For those not familiar with her or her blog, Julie Powell was a bright, frustrated administrative professional working in Lower Manhattan and living in Brooklyn (later Long Island City, Queens) when she decided to embark on an ambitious project, namely preparing each of the 536 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck.  By day she went to work; at night she came home and prepared blanquette de veau and Jambon Braise Morvandelle and a series of aspics, each more terrifying than the one that preceded it.  Each night’s cooking adventure was recorded in her blog, which attracted a large, fascinated and devoted readership.  Eventually the media (including CBS News and Amanda Hesser of the New York Times) took notice, and today Julie Powell has an agent and a book deal.  Her book is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2005.  It is a writer and cook’s dream writ large, a career born of something originally started as a lark, and in my opinion, it could not happen to a more deserving cook/writer than Julie.  Her blog is—or was—great reading.  Julie is funny, salty, opinionated, bemused by the task she set in motion, yet ultimately glad for it.

When news of Julie Powell’s book deal broke, I received a lot of helpful suggestions to try the same thing.  Hey!  You’re a writer, you know food, why don’t you pick a cookbook and cook your way through it and blog it and shop around for a publishing deal? Because the people who recommend this course of action are generally sweet and kind, I try to be diplomatic when I tell them I’ve heard better ideas.  Assuming that I had the stamina to do something like that, there is something vaguely pathetic about glomming onto a good idea and hoping lightning will strike twice.  This might be fine for network programming executives, but I don’t want to do it, at least not now.  Regardless of my opinion of savekaryn.com—I was not impressed, to put it mildly—I will give her credit for having enough moxie to be first out of the gate with the internet-panhandling idea.  I give less credit to people who tried to panhandle their way to divorces, breast implants and sportscars.

Nevertheless, a girl can fantasize, and if enough time passes where it is once again acceptable to cook one’s way across a book and keep a meticulous journal of it, I have my candidate at the ready.

The first edition of Modern Cookery for Private Families by Eliza Acton was published in 1845.  A revised, updated edition was published 10 years later; it is this edition that was published in facsimile by Southover Press in 1993.  It has been acknowledged as one of the finest cookbooks in the English language, and it is easily one of the best cookbooks I own, superior, in my opinion, to the vaunted 20th century kitchen bible, The Joy of Cooking.

Although it was written over 150 years ago, Modern Cookery is still so appropriate, so usable and practical that it would not be untoward to think of it as Timeless Cookery for Private Families instead.  Unlike many of the cookbooks published in the 18th and 19th centuries, Miss Acton’s cookbook was directed at small, middle-class families, rather than to the mistresses of households with a full complement of servants.  As a result, very little scaling up or down needs to be done to these recipes to make them practical for daily use today.  Most of her contemporaries included detailed directions for housekeeping, which, while interesting from a historical perspective, ultimately gives the books a dated feel.  Miss Acton preferred to focus, in her words, on the “elegance and economy” of food, and it shows.  Every page is replete with the consideration, intelligence and energy she brought to her work, and the result is a sublime collection of recipes and instruction.

I reread the soups chapter on the subway home tonight, and I was filled with the desire to make every single soup, even consomme, the time-consuming and meticulous rendering of bones into clear, concentrated meat stock.  I wanted to make milk soups, and beef tea, and mulligatawny, and the extraordinary-sounding Mademoiselle Jenny Lind’s Soup, which was given to Miss Acton by a popular Swedish writer, who in turn obtained it from the great singer’s cook.  It is made from strong veal or beef stock, eggs, cream and sago, a tapioca-like starch.  Miss Acton said that Miss Lind tended to take it before performances, as she found the sago and eggs soothing to the chest and beneficial to the voice.  (This recipe was later “appropriated” by Isabella Beeton, who changed its proportions slightly and rechristened it as “Soupe a la Cantatrice.” About 100 of Miss Acton’s recipes were similarly lifted, revised ever so slightly, and published without attribution in Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Sadly, Mrs. Beeton was neither the first nor the last writer/editor to produce a cookbook in this way.  The 18th and 19th centuries were rife with cookbook plagiarists, and it would be disingenuous to say that such dirty tricks are behind us today.)

It is a dangerous thing for me to quote Miss Acton, because the temptation is strong to quote the entire book (but I will not).  I will give, however, her recipe for something which sounds like a heavenly dish for a cold wet night, an original recipe of hers she calls “The Young Wife’s Pudding”:

Break separately into a cup four perfectly sweet eggs, and with the point of a small three-pronged fork clear them from the specks.  Throw them, as they are done, into a large basin, or a bowl, and beat them up lightly for four or five minutes, then add by degrees two ounces and a half of pounded sugar, with a very small pinch of salt, and whisk the mixture well, holding the fork rather loosely between the thumb and fingers; next, grate in the rind of a quite-fresh lemon, or substitute for it a teaspoon of lemon-brandy, or orange-flower water, which should be thrown in by degrees, and stirred briskly to the eggs.  Add a pint of cold new milk, and pour the pudding into a well buttered dish.  Slice some stale bread, something more than a quarter of an inch thick, and with a very small cake-cutter cut sufficient rounds from it to cover the top of the pudding; butter them thickly with good butter; lay them, with the dry side undermost, upon the pudding, sift sugar thickly on them, and set the dish gently into a Dutch or American oven, which should be placed at the distance of a foot or more from a moderate fire. An hour of very slow baking will be just sufficient to render the pudding firm throughout; but should the fire be fierce, or the oven placed too near it, the receipt will fail.

In a postscript, Miss Acton cautions the reader that while this is an easy and satisfactory pudding, it is easy to ruin if the cook does not watch the temperature of the oven with care.  It is a plain, grand dish, and it shows Miss Acton at her best:  her attention to detail, her no-nonsense but good-humored voice. These qualities are found in abundance throughout the book, evidence of the years she spent testing and retesting, writing and rewriting.  (According to Elizabeth Ray’s introductory notes in the 1993 edition, a review in a popular magazine of the day stated that Miss Acton had spent ten years writing Modern Cookery, and compared her sauces to those of the great French chefs Vatel and Careme.) The chapter on fish preparation, and the introductory chapter on carving techniques, should be used as primary texts in cooking schools.  Not only are they filled with meticulous direction, they are also illustrated—as is the rest of the book—with detailed, breathtakingly beautiful prints, near-perfect combinations of form and function.

It strikes me that I am doing a poor job convincing myself that it would be a bad idea to do this.  But no, I will not steal Julie Powell’s thunder.

Miss Acton wrote another book two years before her death, a smaller but still-brilliant and well-considered tome, The English Bread Book.  Maybe if I start small...no, no, no.  I will be good.  For now.

Although I have not given him the URL, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before my husband finds this little blog of mine, as he is a smart cookie. This should inspire me to be on my best behavior; after all, if I say to him, Gary Hart-like, “Go ahead! Read it! I have nothing to hide!,” I should not be surprised if he takes me up on the offer. Furthermore, I should consider this possibility before writing a page full of sound and fury about what a shitheel he is, how he persists in doing things that make one’s blood gout out of one’s head in anger and despair for the future.

This should inspire me to be good...and yet I am compelled to be mean instead, for not only is my husband so good to me as to be positively sick-making, but he is also self-effacing to boot. He has the good manners to accept an “I love you” graciously, but once you add anything onto that, he becomes sheepish and blushy, clearly uncomfortable in the presence of so much silly love, unless he is in a piss-up mood, in which case he rolls his eyes into the back of his head, sticks his tongue out, lolls his head from side to side and makes ridiculous noises. If he visits this page and reads my bragging on him, he will become downright obnoxious, devising sneaky little psychological torture games and asking, mockingly, “are you going to put this in your blog? How about this? Huh? Huh? Nnnnnnngeeee! Am I making you crazy? Am I Dial M for Murdering you?” Not only is he obnoxious, but he also knows he’s screwing up the movie reference: it’s Gaslight, not Dial M for Murder, that he’s thinking of. He knows this, and he knows it drives me up a wall, and he insists on saying it, as he has daily for almost 12 years.

Note to Lloyd, in the event he is reading this: Dude, you are so annoying.

Lloyd is not his real name, of course. I am enjoined from ever using his real name. So it’s his own damn fault if he doesn’t like his pseud, which I created in honor of a conversation I had with two friends. We were at Telephone Bar and Grill on Second Avenue. They were drinking girl drinks. I was drinking cider, fancying myself all hard and English because I was drinking cider, but considering that it was Woodpecker, I should have been called out as the poseur (poseuse?) that I was and tossed into the gutter like Dylan Thomas.

But I digress. We drank, we drank some more, and as we started getting pleasantly-but-not-yet-obnoxiously sloppy, Meredith began to wax rapturous over Lloyd Dobbler, the hero of Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, played by John Cusack. We oohed and ahhed and reminisced about being just-out-of-teenhood in 1988, falling deeply in thrall with Lloyd, who is smart but directionless, whose best friends are girls, who focuses his considerable intelligence, charm and kindness on the girl he loves, the beautiful-smart-insecure-driven Diane Court. We recited Lloyd’s dinner party reply to Diane’s father’s question “what do plan to do with your life? ("I don’t want to buy anything, sell anything or process anything. I don’t want to buy anything sold or processed, sell anything bought or processed or process anything bought or sold...")

“Remember when all you wanted in a guy was that he be Lloyd Dobbler?” said Meredith.

“Oh, absolutely,” I said.

“Oh, fuck off,” said Bronwyn. Normally in New York this phrase is shorthand for “let’s have an alcohol-fueled obscenity-laden fistfight,” but since Bronwyn was from London, I knew that oh, fuck off is London-speak for oh, puh-leeze. “You married Lloyd Dobbler, didn’t you?”

Note to Lloyd: Oh, fuck off.

Well, let us count the ways: While he works like a dog, always brings home the bacon and has ambitions, plans and dreams, career-wise he is not what the social-climbing striver girls in New York would consider a good earner. His skills are not manifested in his resume, but once he enters a certain work environment he proves himself both flexible and indispensible to the team. He listens to swell music, although he has never serenaded me with a boom box. He used to wear a very Lloyd-ish trenchcoat, giving it up only after being followed by store security when he went to a nice liquor store to buy me a bottle of Armagnac for my 30th birthday. He can talk all night long without talking too much, if that makes sense. He can defend himself if he is physically attacked. These are all good things, but does this make him Lloyd Dobbler, who won Diane Court’s heart by steering her around the broken glass she almost walked over in the parking lot?

Normally, I abhor abrupt transitions, but I promise that there is a point to this. When I was 12, my family got a kitten. Kitten grew up into a cat, then an old cat, then an older-than-the-hills cat. He died when I was 27, long after I had grown up and moved out, and about a year after I got married. This should all be in the natural order of things, except that our poor Smokey died a particularly cruel death, cruel to him, cruel to us, the kind of cruelty that makes you believe Depeche Mode was onto something when they sang “Blasphemous Rumours.” Smokey had grown up, as I did, in the wild hinterlands of northeastern Pennsylvania, the northern end of the Poconos, the southern end of the Catskills. Then my folks up and moved back to Philadelphia, having finally been driven mad by 20+ years in Wayne County, itching to move back to a place where you didn’t need to apologize if your family hadn’t lived in Wayne County for the past 150 years. Smokey came with them, and spent close to two years refusing to go outside, fixing my parents with a look of contempt for moving him somewhere where there were many fewer mice and garter snakes to kill. Then one day he decided he would be fine outside as long as he stayed close to the perimeter of the house. He was good with this for a year, perambulating around the house, pretending to be stalking prey but really doing his little geriatric mall-walker kitty laps.

We still don’t know why he decided to break form one chilly night in February, and head down the driveway. All we know is that he did, and that he slipped on a piece of ice and fell under the back wheel of the car that my mom was reversing out of the driveway. I will not dwell on what followed, on how he survived, and was alive when Mom rushed him to the vet, but the vet couldn’t say for sure if he could be saved, so maybe we should just end his pain, which we did. I will pass briefly over the vale of tears, of how distraught my mom was, of how my brother, 17 at the time, not only missed the cat he’d known since he was 2, but was also thrown off by how much pain our mom was in ("I just want my mom back,” he said to me on the phone, his voice filled with confusion). I will not even begin to describe how I cried twofold: tears for Smokey, who, by virtue of his age, had earned the right to die in his sleep but instead had to die in pain and fear; tears for my mom, who adored that cat, and was filled with guilt that nobody could assuage, nobody could fix. Despite my vow to go to work and be a pro, I cried, silently, all week at the office, hoping that no one would ask me what was wrong, because when I told them, you could see the look in their eyes: sure it’s a shame, but is one dead cat worth all this?

I came home from work one night, feeling sad but ready to feel better, ready for the finest mindless entertainment broadcast television could provide. On came an ad for some expensive pet-store cat food. “When you love your cat,” said the sorghum-y female voiceover, “you want to take the best care of her.” Instant, gushing, body-convulsing sobs from me, the same litany running through my head, oh my cat, oh my mom, oh my cat, oh my mom.

Lloyd sprang for the remote and changed the channel.

“What are you doing?,” I asked. “Aren’t you watching that?”

“We’ll put it back when the commercial is over,” said Lloyd.

“No, don’t be silly. I’m sorry. Put it back.”

“No, I can put it back on in a few seconds.”

“Lloyd, really,” I said. “I just have to get over it. We can’t change the channel every time a cat food ad comes on.”

“Tonight, we can,” he said. And he did, that night and every night until several weeks later, when my mom called to announce shyly that she had saved a cat from the pound, a cat that was due to be put down, a cat that had never been separated from its brother, so of course she had to get both of them, and no, they weren’t Smokey, but they’re pretty great cats nonetheless…

Does he steer me around broken glass? Damn right, he does.

Note to Lloyd: Are you still here? Aren’t you supposed to be writing something now? Don’t you have anything better to do than to sit around and read blogs all night? Get to work, Internet Boy!