Dear Diary: Make 'Em Laugh
Last week, I was so productive. This week, not so much. Not at all.
I know that I had an interesting idea for this entry when I got up this morning; I ought to have written it down. Later, I did a bit of cooking. I used the grinder attachment to the Kitchen Aid stand mixer for the first time in several years, possibly ten. I had been organizing the top of the cabinets, and the Le Creuset terrine looked so forlorn that I resolved to make a pâté maison, using Mrs Child’s recipe in The Way to Cook, as soon as possible. I’ve been moving so slowly, however, that the ingredients that I bought on Sunday almost exceeded their cook-by date. (The result seems tasty enough.) I also baked a quiche, this time remembering to toss in the cheese. Cheese is not a canonical ingredient of quiche — quiche Lorraine, anyway — but it makes a big difference. Forgetting the cheese two weeks ago produced a quiche that I can only describe as non-dairy. There was milk in it, yes; but isn’t milk the most non-dairy of dairy products?
I’m horribly distracted, these days, by the conviction that the world has taken a bad turn. (It’s probably just fatigue.)Â I worry a lot about the day when the guys at Con Ed wake up and just don’t give a damn about whether we have any power. That day seems foretold on almost every page of Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages (which I hope to write up tomorrow). I always pray that I won’t be in the elevator.
On a positive note, Megan’s pregnancy has entered its third trimester. My daughter is blooming; she is one of those expectant mothers who makes carrying a child seem like the most wonderful thing that a person could do. Not the most “natural” — she’s not at all obnoxious about it. In fact, she has begun to find the climb out of the subway, in the morning commuter rush, a bit of a trial. But it’s definitely wonderful: I do envy the little one. His mother is definitely going to love him; there’s no doubt about that. But/And she’s not going to love him too much. She’s not going to be a needy mom, not at all.
Maybe I’m quiet because I’m loudly aware that neither of my grandfathers, if they could see me now, would acknowledge that I’d grown up by so much as a day, since they walked the earth (in the mid-Fifties). I still wear short pants, and I don’t have a job! There’s being a grandfather — which can just happen, if you have children — and there’s being a “grandfather,” which, actually, I expect to be rather better at than either of them were willing to be. One was too dashing to be a grandfather; the other was too cantankerous. And neither one of them knew how to change a diaper. They would have considered it indecent to be in the same room as a naked infant. Perhaps our sex-offenses laws have brought us full-circle on that one.
Whether my grandfathers liked babies, I can’t say. I rather think not. I do like babies, though, enormously. The better part is — and I’m hoping that my grandson won’t prove to be an exception — that babies like me. I make them laugh.