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. 

The Perfect Day

Los Angeles, California

A cautionary tale: spending a month out of each year in Carmel (or Santa Fe, or anywhere else you might find idyllic) is dangerous. And I can, more or less, encapsulate the danger in one word: reentry. This is the term which Billy and I use for the return to our life in Los Angeles. While we try in every imaginable way to fool ourselves, the truth is that we spend eleven months in Los Angeles each year, and only one in Carmel. No matter how hard we try to turn that fact around, it stubbornly persists.

It's not that I don't, to borrow from Randy Newman, love L.A. I have to say that I have a fondness for LA, even with all of its negatives (like traffic, that 'industry' and the far-flung logistics of the city), as well as tender memories of the Los Angeles from my earlier years (as written about in the post entitled The One Year Anniversary of Neighborhood Chaos. Read it here, for free!). But, as in all places where one lives, our lives here are intricately complicated by the stuff of day-to-day reality -- aging parents, banking, business, health, home repair, etc. You have at least some of the same responsibilities and concerns, I am sure, so I'll spare us all the details.

We consider our time in Carmel to be a retreat. And, retreats have loomed very large in our legend. There was a decade or so when we actually scheduled retreat weekends at our home. We would block out an entire weekend, and not make any plans except to stay at home. There were rules to go along with these weekends which included the prohibition of all work except basic zen chores like meal preparation and clean up. We also prohibited television watching (no big deal today as we watch less and less of it), though watching movies was allowed. I would stock the house with good stuff to eat, drink, read (magazines), and watch (movies). I also bought bath gels, lotions, and scented candles. We lit the house at night with candles, and, if it were summertime, we went barefooted, after hanging out by the pool all day. We used to schedule these retreats about four times a year, and we looked forward to them. But eventually, life took over that time and space. In Carmel, however, the retreat lives, albeit in slightly different form.

We suspend a lot of our LA activity when we're in Carmel. Billy doesn't work there, and I don't dance. We walk most days. We cook a lot. I still have to do some basic accounting for home and business, but it's nothing compared to what I do at home. I get to write each day. And I am free from the clutter of home life which constantly taunts me, reminding me of how disorganized I am, or of how much more work I should be doing. It's hard not to feel overwhelmed when everywhere you look there is a job to be done, or a repair to be scheduled, or a renovation to be undertaken. So after I return home, I try to combat this by focusing on the smaller projects which can be more easily undertaken. Baby steps.

However, currently, I find myself facing what feels more like a big, old giant step, as now, home again, I am tackling a pinnacle of that aforementioned clutter by attempting to organize my office. It simply has to be done, and done now. I have this theory that there is a moment in chaos when you either get a handle on it all, or you lose it forever. I once witnessed my mother-in-law passing this point in time, and subsequently losing control of her garage. And, my office is now teetering on that brink. So, upon returning from the bliss of Carmel, I knew that I would need to face the hell of my office space. And that is what I am currently doing. I call this the Healy Office Organization Project, or HOOP. And I'm just starting to get rolling (forgive me, I couldn't resist).

As in all large undertakings, there must be some impetus, some motivating factor, something that keeps your mojo going while you are digging in. And for me, that is the perfect day. You know how you don't get very many of those in life? I'm talking about the day that is perfect from beginning to end. Everything works, everything falls into place, everything goes all glimmering (again, as F. Scott once wrote). And, you actually realize it while it's happening. Lucky for me, I had one of those days while I was in Carmel.

It was a Sunday that started off by being a good hair day. No small thing. Billy had come back to Carmel the night before at the end of a rainy day, and we had enjoyed martinis, an artichoke, and a duck tamale in the bar at the Rio Grill. We went to Mass at the Mission Basilica that next morning, and the sun was streaming in through the windows while we were there. After church, we met our friend John at La Bicyclette in town. We enjoyed a lovely lunch in this space filled with sunlight, and laughed a lot with John who is easily the funniest man we know.

After lunch, we raced back to our little house to meet our friends, Diana and Brendan. Diana is a BFF and one of my favorite fristers. We met on a Caribbean cruise in 1995 -- both traveling with our mothers. And, as I wrote in a previous post entitled Fristers (read it here, for free!), we went on to travel three more times together with our moms. Diana's husband, Brendan, is warm, wonderful, and always fun to be around. Billy and Brendan quickly became good friends, so we always look forward to being in their company. That evening, we went to Mission Ranch for drinks at sunset, then to a local tapas restaurant which we had saved to try for the first time with them. We drank a lot of sangria, shared a variety of interesting dishes, then hurried home for an evening of . . . and I'm so sorry, but in truth, it is a card game which is simply called . . . Shithead.

Now, we didn't invent nor name this game, and we have tried to come up with something different to call it. For awhile we went french, calling it something like Merde. But Shithead is its name, and Shithead it has stayed (I'm starting to get used to writing this over and over, did you notice?). Diana and Brendan's daughter taught it to them several years ago, and they taught it to us. And it has stuck. We play it every time we are together, sometimes into the early morning hours. One summer when they visited us, we decided that whoever won each hand had to display a talent. This ran the gamut from Billy manipulating his hands so that it looked like his thumb was cut off (Billy never forgets any trick or joke he learned in elementary school), to Brendan singing in the voice of Daffy Duck (or so he said, when in reality he was imitating Porky Pig, which we all immediately pointed out to him . . . like, that's not Daffy Duck, that's Porky Pig! we all cried in unison), to Diana singing the Canadian National Anthem in first English, then in French. What did I do? I whistled piercingly with my fingers in my mouth, and joined Diana in singing, from memory, Frank Mills from the musical, Hair. But, truth be told, the game is almost as much fun without the talent show. So on this night in Carmel, we just played it (Shithead . . . see I just wrote it again).

That was that. It was a perfect day. A ten. And the afterglow of it stays with me as our rough reentry begins to smooth, and I begin to proceed with the HOOP. Thank goodness for the memory of that day! A memory that can keep me going until the next perfect day occurs. I hope you have one soon, and I thank you for reading my blog.