Passion

"How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Travelers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at a home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language."

I read this today in The Passion, a novel by Jeanette Winterson. A strange and intense book but then just about any book I read these days seems to have a message for me.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Every day I am in Treasure Beach my mood improves. Maybe it's because I am spending large amounts of time hanging out with Liz and Giuliano. Maybe it's because I can sit on the veranda of Shaki Home and watch the sky and listen to the sea all day long and never tire of the view or the sound. Whatever the reasons, I feel comfortable here not like at home where I felt like a black sign screaming, WIDOW!, was pasted on my forehead, weighing me down both physically and mentally. Nothing like putting on flip-flops and having my toenails painted a bright turquoise blue to lift the spirits.

I just finished reading Joan Didion's amazing book, "The Year of Magical Thinking". I don't think I could have finished it anywhere else. I didn't want to read it right after Steve died. Too scary, iI thought, but the possibility, even the necessity, of reading the book was always in the back of my mind, almost like a moral imperative. Finally I opened it and read a few chapters right before I left for Jamaica. I imagined that sitting outside with the book in my lap, the sun shining on my face, the sound of the waves pulsing in the background would make it less painful to read. I guess that was my my own little bit of magical thinking. Yes, it was painful but no it wasn't overwhelminly depressing. In a weird way it was almost exhilarating. Above all it was absolutely true. I think it will take me weeks, maybe months, to process this book. I keep wanting to go back, underline more sentences, mark more passages. I don't want to forget any of the details. I want to follow Joan Didion step by step all the way along the path she painstakingly, obsessively describes. Because she did it and she survived. Not only survived but worked and worked to remember it and write it all down. A guidebook to the underworld.

In Jamaica

I'm in Jamaica alone without Steve. I've been in Jamaica several times by myself during Liz's tenure here over the past few years. But, like all things now that Steve is gone, this time feels different. I'm just so conscious of all the things he's missing. He won't meet Rocco, Liz and Giul's new dog. He won't see how big Pella has grown. He won't see how much progress they've made on their land or the bungalow they are building there.

I have to tell him all these things and much more. I have to feel his happiness and glow with his pride. I have to carry him inside me wherever I go.

I HATE BEING A WIDOW

I hate being defined as a woman whose husband has died, leaving her alone. I hate thinking all the time about my husband who is not with me. Maybe I'm in the angry phase of grieving. Whatever. It sucks just as much as the shock and awe and disbelief phase.

I didn't feel this way in London last week. I felt free and happy. I could do anything I wanted to when I wanted to. I could sleep late, spend hours in a museum, sit at a bar and have a cocktail all by myself. I missed Steve but I didn't feel overwhelmingly lonely or sad. I felt bad for him that he was missing this experience. And then I felt grateful to him that I was having this experience.

I HATE BEING A WIDOW but here I am blogging relentlessly about what that feels like to me.

London

I am happy. I am sad. I am in London. I planned this trip very deliberately as an antidote to the drama of the first Thanksgiving without Steve. I also wanted to prove to myself that I could keep on traveling by myself and London seemed a good destination for such an experiment. Good to know I've passed the test with flying colors.

Every day I am here I feel incredibly lucky to be alive, to be here in this exciting, sophisticated and multi cultural city, eating great food, soaking up great culture. There is so much to do and see it's almost overwhelming. And yet every once in awhile I find myself in tears thinking of Steve and what he is missing. I don't mind being alone but I miss being with him. Some of our best times together were in foreign places. I was always the cicerone, planning our trips, mapping our daily itineraries. He listened faithfully and with full attention when I read to him from the guide books. I just had to make sure he was fed regularly, not a difficult task. Lord knows, I hate to miss a meal.

Even now by myself dinner is a ritual to be honored. No hiding in my hotel room and ordering room service. The show must go on.

Post Turkey

I survived Thanksgiving. I feel relieved, tired, cautiously optimistic sort of how I felt after taking an exam in college after having stayed up all night to study, seeing the questions, writing the essay and thinking this is going turn out alright. Maybe not an easy A but definitely more than passable. Somewhere during the process, automatic pilot kicks in and you can't help but do what you have to do.

It definitely helped having the house full of people, all thinking the same thing: Where the hell is Steve?

Sometimes I feel like I am starring in a reality TV show, "Widowhood: The First Year." This weekend's episode was "The First Thanksgiving Alone." She laughs, she cries, she gets lots of flowers. This week, the story moves to London, where our fearless heroine is taking her first solo vacation since losing her husband. How will she feel? What will she do? Stay tuned for the next dramatic episode.

Turkey

I am really worried about my turkey this year. Actually, every Thanksgiving, I worry about my turkey. For years, I stuffed it and rubbed it with unconscionable amounts of soft butter, draped it in butter-soaked cheese cloth, then roasted it slowly BREAST SIDE DOWN as mandated long ago by my mother, Muriel Schwartz Beck, basted it religiously every 20 minutes or so (also her instructions) and then had several intense consultations with whoever was in the kitchen at the time before finally pronouncing it done. My biggest fear always was that my turkey, despite my careful adherence to my mother’s rules, would turn out like the one we were served at my Aunt Roz’s house i.e. dry as a hockey pock, tough as an old moccasin. Thank god those fears were never realized.

One year in my crusade to cook the ideal turkey, I ordered a turkey from some arcane online gourmet site touting the best of the best. Their best turkey turned out to be a turkey injected with duck fat, in other words, an upscale version of the ubiquitous butterball turkey sold in every large supermarket chain but without the pop up plastic timer. This was an experiment that was never repeated.

Last year in my continued quest to find the ideal turkey, I ordered a heritage breed turkey from Heritage Foods. The vendor instructed me not to stuff it but, as my mother’s daughter, I hedged my bets by giving it a serious butter rubdown and basting it occasionally. Surprise, surprise, it was juicy and succulent and everyone loved the taste. To my dismay when I went to order a similar turkey this year in early October, they were already sold out!

So this year I ordered a turkey from Kol Foods, purveyor of kosher, organic turkeys, figuring I wouldn’t have to bother with the mess of brining the bird, an always iffy procedure which usually results my having to mop up large quantities of salty water from my kitchen floor and counters. The only glitch was that this year's turkey came to me, a woman who has only ever cooked a freshly killed turkey, frozen solid as a rock. It now sits in my refrigerator slowly defrosting or at least I hope it is. On Thursday, I plan to bathe it in butter, baste it like crazy, etc. etc. Here’s hoping it works.