C'est Bastille Day!

Los Angeles, California


Our house guests arrived on Friday the 13th, just a day or so after my voice vacated. To say that Billy and I had been burning the candle at both ends would be lying. We were burning it in the middle, as well. At first, I figured I was suffering from allergies. I don't generally get waylaid by anything other than the blues. But, neither allergies nor the blues are contagious. And Billy came down with whatever the raging plague was shortly after I got it.


Our house guests, Brendan and Diana, were good-natured about this. They have come for a long weekend visit for the past seven or so summers. We generally hang about the pool all day, finally showering in the early evening, then reconvening for cocktails, and finally dinner. We're talking late dinner; usually nine o'clock or even past that (which is fine with us as neither Billy nor I believe you should eat dinner while it is still light out, unless it is a holiday, and sometimes not even then). The last night they take us out to dinner. And, that's been the tradition, which was, in many years, tied to the Fourth of July holiday.


This year was a little different. First, B & D were not available for the Fourth. Then, we discovered that Garrison Keillor was bringing A Prairie Home Companion to The Hollywood Bowl on Friday the 13th of July. So, we got tickets for a box, and invited them for the weekend of the 13th. They accepted, with the caveat that they wanted to take us out to dinner two of the four nights they would be here. We agreed (what's not to like about that?), and all went according to plan, except for that pesky, raging plague thing.


You know how you always manage to make it through finals or your wedding, and then you get sick? Well, we've had that kind of a year -- making it through a lot. I guess we finally succumbed to defensive indifference (great baseball term, which I learned last year, and will use for a post title someday) and you know what followed.


We more or less limped through the weekend. B & D are perfect friends and house guests. They never complained, and even cheerfully sat in our box at the Bowl, and at dinner and card tables with us without flinching at all the coughing we were doing. They were much nicer than we would have been about this, by the way. Billy is relentless about not being around people who are sick. I'm a little less so, trusting my body's ability to fight things off with the aid of Purell (a pro-active regime which obviously failed me this time). But B & D were troupers.


Diana and I have spent some portion of most of the summers that have come and gone since we met each other, in 1995, on a Caribbean cruise. We were both traveling with our moms, and, as mentioned in an earlier post (available here for free!), we went on to cruise together with the moms another three times. Her mom, Emma, who was lovely and fun, passed away three years ago. At about that same time, my mom began to dwindle. Lots of changes in both our lives, but we have remained a constant in each other's, which is both heartwarming and comforting.


So, you might ask, what does all of this have to do with Bastille Day? Well, that requires a bit of backstory. Another couple, who are friends of ours, once told us about this week they spent in the Loire Valley in France. They had rented a home there with some very nice British friends. Their time there together sounded like something out of M.F.K. Fisher. Each day they would tour around the area, tasting and buying wines and, if memory serves, visiting markets in the small towns. For dinner, they often put out a variety of french cheeses, pates, and some french bread. They would enjoy the bread, the cheese, the wines. Meanwhile, they would roast a chicken, and that would be their dinner, followed by a green salad. I LOVE stories like that, and have, for a long time, lusted after replicating that menu. And so, this is what I did on Bastille Day. I put out two cheeses: a brie and a fontina with rosemary. I threw a loaf of french bread into my convection oven where the chicken was roasting, and tossed a salad of plain arugula dressed with lemon oil, sea salt, and pepper. Then, I prepped the roasted cauliflower (recipe in my post dated March 5, 2012 entitled: What's Cooking, available here, oh you know) and slid that into the oven.


We had candles (ok, they were those cool battery candles, which I've been buying by the boatload) all over the table, and we ate our bread, the lovely cheeses, and the slightly-underdressed salad (ran out of lemon oil, oops!), with the warm crusty bread. I was IN HEAVEN! Seriously, we avoid cheese and especially those triple-creme varieties, for the same reason that you probably all do. And then. And then you realize that your soul really needs some good cheese every now and then. After the cheese (and the other stuff, but this is obviously all about the cheese) we had the chicken and the cauliflower before we moved to the dining room inside to play our favorite card game which is called (I'm so sorry!) Shithead. We had gelato and my homemade chocolate chunk-coconut-pecan cookies for dessert. Yes, a summer fruit tart would have been better, with less dairy after all that cheese. But still.


After our guests left, Billy and I collapsed for about five days. We held it together, mas o menos, while they were here, but it all caught up with us and we were both sick and tired. In fact, as of today, we're still incredibly exhausted. But I suspect that's more because of the past year than because of whatever this bug happens to be (a widespread bug, as I know a lot of people who have either have this, or did have it).


Once we're feeling better, we intend to spend the rest of our summer weekends relaxing by the pool. It's been a long, hard year, and we both deserve some time out, enjoying our home and each other's company. But, as I'm never without some plan or another, here are some notes on my plan for those weekends:


1) After sundown, no shoes and no electric lights.


2) After eating salads for dinner during the week, Saturday or Sunday nights will entail a revisit to the cheese & chicken repast described above (we started this last night, with the leftover fontina and a truffle cheese). This predicated on our continued low lipid count.


3) Lots of music (I finally loaded my replacement iPod and we've been listening to a lot of Hawaiian slack-key and Brazilian Bossa Nova from the 60s. I sneak in a little salsa whenever I feel I can get away with it.


So there you have it. Bastille Day with all the summer bliss that follows: eat good food; play fun games with friends; enjoy candlelit nights; run barefoot through your house, and all to your favorite music. This is probably the best advice you will get from me, like, maybe ever! Or at least for the duration of the summer. Happy Bastille Day, bon appeitit, et merci bien for reading my blog. 

Independence Day

Los Angeles, California


Let us recount the major holidays of the year, shall we? Certainly Christmas/Christmas Eve, which count as a pair, I think; Thanksgiving and Easter (sticking with my religious holidays since it's my blog). Then the secular ones: Memorial, Independence, and Labor Days; Mom & Pop Days; Halloween. I would say that my enthusiasm trails off for those obscure holidays in the middle designed to give students and the hard-working labor force a three-day holiday, but not Billy (our business is closed on Sundays and Mondays anyway, so he gets screwed cheated).


I never moved very far away from my parents, so we always celebrated the big holidays (see above: the first ones mentioned) with my family. Once, in the early years of our marriage, I told my mom that Billy and I had decided to spend every other Thanksgiving with Billy's family, since his father's health was failing and we didn't know how long he'd be around. In response to that, my mom burst into tears. Billy's dad passed away that next summer, and we continued to spend all the holidays with my family. And I'm not begrudging this. I enjoyed being with my family. They celebrated well -- good champagne and wines, an attention to the food (that being the raison d'etre, often even more so than the congregation), and conversation that, as a rule, stayed away from religion, politics, anyone's rights. Unfortunately, when you knock that all off the table, people tend to veer towards describing episodes of television shows, causing my eyes to quickly turn to pinwheels (I Love Lucy, Soap, & The Golden Girls being the exception to this rule, and you can see how au courant I am on this subject). But none of this is the point of this post.


I no longer have any family left to celebrate these holidays with (see that preposition? I'm just going to leave it there). And my anticipation of that was seeded with dread. But, somehow, it hasn't been as awful as I expected. In fact, after the first year (which was truly hard), I've even enjoyed making some new traditions.


Easter is the tricky holiday. That was OUR holiday (even though we also hosted Christmas, and in some years, and all later years, Christmas Eve, and occasionally Thanksgiving). We used to scrape up all the family we could, including Billy's mom and a stray sibling and nephew, distant cousins, whoever. We were looking for numbers, honestly believing in the more, the merrier -- especially where my family is concerned. If the weather cooperated, we would do a big bash outside. Numbers determined how many tables we would set. In our earlier years at this house, before we built the swimming pool which sits in the courtyard of our U-shaped house, the men would carry the dining room table outside. I would set it with a Belgian lace tablecloth that my aunt brought me from, well, Belgium; my grandmother's china; the silver given to me by my parents; the Waterford that Billy's mom bought for me in Ireland. We would eat an afternoon dinner under the large sprawling oak tree that was one of the major reasons we bought this house. We usually listened to Bach and Mozart on Easter, and don't even ask me why. Many of those Easters felt, well, magical. But, those Easters are long-gone, and we have no tradition as of yet to replace them. I have thought about recreating them with friends, but that is still feeling too daunting. Maybe next year . . .


Meanwhile, Fourth of July has come and gone. Because of the way the holiday fell on the calendar, Billy had four days off. He's been working non-stop at our business during the week; helping to find a place for my mom, then finally moving my mom; all on the weekends. It's been a really hard year for him, and he's beat. But, instead of hanging out by the pool for four days, we decided to try to get a handle on our house. We are probably storing thirty boxes of my mom's things. And these are not organized in any way. Plus, as we were spending so much time visiting her; doing research on Board and Care, then finally moving her, a lot of our own possessions and paper disintegrated to clutter. I have this theory that there is a point in time when you either wrest control or lose it forever, and we were teetering on the brink.


So, we spent the four days working. Of course we didn't accomplish as much as we had hoped. But we made a fair dent and got momentarily inspired to continue. In the evenings, we made simple dinners, watched the Dodgers play and lose, then watched the movie 1776 on July 4th. The weather was unseasonably cool (read: low 80s, and my God, we're spoiled), and we never made it into the pool. But we have house guests coming next week, and that period of time is usually spent in and by the pool each day.


I told Billy that our work was over for the summer. We will take time out for the rest of the weekends through July and August. He needs this, and, frankly, so do I. Other holidays will come and go. We will celebrate; break bread with friends; remember the holidays that have come before - those markers of time, and makers of memories, for better or for worse. Hope you made some of your own, with good food and companionship, this Independence Day. As for us, next year, no work . . . except fireworks! Happy Birthday America! And, thank you for reading my blog.