Recently in Memories Category

I've had this odd hungry feeling recently, like I can't quite get what I want. Or there's some hollow space that needs filling or something. If I knew what it was I'd sort it out. I know it's an eating disorder thing, but I've been looking in cupboards for things to eat, trying out all kinds of things and not being actually happy with anything I've put in my mouth. Yesterday I had cereal for lunch and seriously considered oatmeal porridge for dinner. At 9 pm I had bread and jam with no real excuse.

I've worked it out though: what I really want is my mom. I have really vivid memories of some of my mom's comfort eating things, mostly after waking up from a nap in the afternoon. One of her favourites was a tomato ketchup sandwich on white bread with a thick layer of margarine. She also liked leftover roast potatoes straight from the fridge, but she really really liked leftover bread and butter pudding.

So because I can't have my mom here today I'm going to try to ring her instead, and while I do that I'll share my favourite recipes for her favourite pudding.

Bread and Butter Pudding (for microwave/combination)

75g butter
6 thick slices bread (I like using Fries suikerbrood)
100g raisins
45 ml sugar
grated zest of 1 orange
2 ml cinnamon
2 large eggs
300 ml milk

1. Preheat oven to 230C.
   
2. Butter the bread and cut into fingers. Layer in an ovenproof buttered dish with the raisins.
   
3. Sprinkle each layer with cinnamon, sugar and orange zest. Don't be stingy with the sprinkling, you can't have too much of these things.
4. Beat the eggs and milk together, then pour over the bread. Leave to soak for about 15 minutes but longer if you have the patience.
   
5. Bake on combination 6 (this is in a panasonic combi oven, if you have a different kind just wing it) for about 20 - 25 minutes until golden.
6. Serve hot with cream.

This recipe is nice because the combi cooking keeps the inside of the pudding moist. If you don't have a combi function here's a classic recipe from Robert Carrier, and from my mom's favourite book: Cooking for Friends. This is the one I used to have when I was growing up.

Robert Carrier's Bread and Butter Pudding

175g softened butter
12 slices thick cut white bread
4 tablespoons marmalade
juice and finely grated rind of 2 large oranges
juice and finely grated rind of 1 lemon
75g castor sugar
Custard:
400 ml milk
2 eggs
2 tablespoons castor sugar
4 tablespoons lightly whipped cream

1. Preheat oven to 200C.
2. Grease or spray a shallow 1 3/4 litre baking dish.
3. Spread slices with butter and marmalade and cut into triangles.
4. Combine juice and rinds in a bowl, add castor sugar and combine until dissolved.
5. Line bottom and sides of dish completely with triangles of bread dipping them into the orange syrup as you use them and arranging them buttered side up. Filled the lined dish with the remainder of the bread triangles, reserving a few for the top of the pudding.
6. Make the custard by heating the milk to just below boiling point then beat the eggs lightly and pour the hot milk onto them gradually, beating constantly. Return the mixture to the pan, add sugar and stir over a low heat until the custard thickens to the point where it will coat the back of the spoon.
7. Remove from the heat, cool slightly and stir in the cream.
8. Pour the custard over the bread in the baking dish, cut the remaining triangles in half and soak in the rest of the syrup and arrange on the top of the pudding. Pour the leftover syrup over the top.
9. Bake for 30 minutes or until crisp and golden on the outside with a soft creamy centre.

On January 26, 2007 I must have missed my mom too, because I just found this post, which has my own bread and butter pudding recipe in it.

So now you have three possible recipes, and I still miss my mom.

(Comments actually work again now, choose comment anonymously and fill in the fields.)

I've been reading The History of Love and there are some sentences in that book that really just get me. Absolutely get me, like hands around the heart and squeezing hard get me. Most of the book has to do with death in one form or another. Losing people, losing things, losing life.

Here is a quote:

'Three years later, I lost Mameh. The last time I saw her she was wearing a yellow apron. She was stuffing things in a suitcase, the house was a wreck. She told me to go out into the woods. She'd packed me food, and told me to wear my coat, even though it was July. 'Go,' she said. I was too old to listen, but like a child I listened. She told me that she'd follow the next day. We chose a spot we both knew in the woods. The giant walnut tree you used to like, Tateh, because you said it had human qualities. I didn't bother to say goodbye. I chose to believe what was easier. I waited. But. She never came. Since then I've lived with the guilt of understanding too late that she thought she would have been a burden to me. I lost Fritzy. He was studying in Vilna, Tateh - someone who knew someone told me he'd last been seen on a train. I lost Sari and Hanna to the dogs. I lost Herschel to the rain. I lost Josef to a crack in time. I lost the sound of laughter. I lost a pair of shoes, I'd taken them off to sleep, the shoes Herschel gave me, and when I woke they were gone, I walked barefoot for days and then I broke down and stole someone else's. I lost the only woman I ever wanted to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was born. And I lost Isaac. So who is to say that somewhere along the way, without my knowing it, I didn't also lose my mind.'

I'm not sure of the moment exactly during the last three weeks that I became quite so preoccupied with death. I remember thinking during the accident that I might be killing my companion. Filled me with absolute horror, and I was too busy being horrified to consider the possibility of my own death. I seem to have been considering it ever since.

It's a strange thing isn't it? You want to be the one who goes so you are not the one who is left. Being left behind is much worse than just being oblivious (I believe there is no afterlife), but perhaps wanting to be the one who goes first is the ultimate form of running away?

When I was little I lived with my paternal grandmother in the week and my mom and dad on the weekends. I would have to say my bedtime prayers every night (on my knees if you please) and mine would be a mantra of 'Dear God, please don't let Gran die' over and over under my breath until I could get off my knees and get into bed. The gods must have listened because Gran lived into her 90s.

Eventually, when she died, I was distanced enough not to be really affected. She'd had Alzheimer's so she wasn't really herself anymore anyway. I often wonder though how that feeling of extreme attachment ebbs to a point where you feel vague discontent at the idea of someone's death, but not the gnashing misery that you felt in your gut when you considered it before. How easily things slip away.

My maternal grandmother's death affected me much more badly. She was younger. I was closer to her and I was too preoccupied with my life at the time to visit her much when she was in hospital. I didn't understand that she was dying because no-one told me, so when she did go, and I was told on a sunny day that she had died I was aghast.

My grandfather died some time later and even though I loved him, my Oupa, I didn't really feel a huge pull of anything when he died. I had visited him a lot after Ouma died and I think he was just really relieved to go. I barely remember either funeral, although I must have been there. Instead, I have vivid memories of my Great Uncle Vic's funeral, but that's a story for another day.

Yesterday at the divorce mediator's office we were asked if we had any funeral insurance and when we answered 'no', the mediator said 'wow, living dangerously, aren't you?'

Living dangerously by not having funeral insurance? Doesn't that seem a little ironic?

What do you think? Do you have any funeral insurance? Do you think you need any? What's your approach to the adventure of dying?

 

'I hate to look into those eyes and see an ounce of pain ...' - Sheryl Crow, Sweet Child o' Mine

Oh my baby boy, you are 8 today. I still think of the very first time we met, your hands clasped together, your blue blue eyes looking up at me, your tiny naked body slippery wet against my breasts.

Happy birthday my darling.

I love you.

'Nowhere man, can you see me at all?' - Natalie Merchant, after The Beatles, Nowhere Man

'My girl, my girl, where will ya go?' - Nirvana, Where did you sleep last night?

Today I've been thinking about the mechanics of leaving, the up-and-going of it all. The things that go with us and the things we leave behind. I've been thinking about the past a lot recently. The therapist I don't have would be proud.

Let's rewind a bit to 1995. I was married to K and lived in Mount Pleasant, Harare. We had a nanny for my daughter, a company car, both of us worked, life was pretty good. Friends, parties, social stuff. We were outwardly very happy, even down to the piano duets. You know how it is. We were married when I was 18 and we stayed married until the year I turned 21. They say big things happen to women each decade. I guess that's true, big things do happen to women each decade. But also, people make choices that perhaps seemed the right ones at the time, or perhaps we're not the same people we will be later.

Anyway, I was difficult to deal with, and I still am; over-emotional, insecure, chronically unable to trust, afraid of being left alone. He was laid-back, too much so; disinvested, laconic, unaffectionate; unwilling to get past the barriers that I threw up every time I suspected I might get hurt; unable to understand why, despite the confident exterior, that the interior was completely fucked up. He didn't do the things I wanted when I needed them and I didn't know how to communicate what I needed. By the time we split up the mountain between us was insurmountable and the past indelible.

So what happened then?

I just left one day. Just like that. Overnight. One day I was there, and the next I was gone and I left my whole life behind me and started over. I took only my books, my music and my paintings. I had no money, no home, nowhere to go, but at the time it seemed the right choice.

I wonder if it says something about me, that these things - books, music and art - are the only constants in what seems an ever-moving landscape for me?

I've been looking at my bookshelves today and although most of the books that travelled with me from Africa are in storage downstairs I have Kerouac's Big Sur on my bookshelf and Marguerite de Angeli's Skippack School and Elin's Amerika, both 1941 editions. I have somewhere, Allen Ginsberg's Howl and of course, the book of poetry that I've written about before.

When I open the de Angeli books I'm immediately transported to the floor of my grandmother's house, where I would wonder at St Lucia and schools where they wrote on slates and carried lunch in a pail. Ginsberg's Howl reminds me of my boyfriend N, and his friends who were so achingly intellectual, goth and hip that on Saturday nights we would smoke dope and read the beat poets to each other, in lieu of anything better to do.

K, my ex, introduced me to science fiction, for which I'm eternally grateful, especially when I can discuss Ender's Game or Fahrenheit 451 intelligently. He taught me to analyse science fiction and to enjoy it. Before I met him I was steeped in modern literature. He opened the door to a world where your imagination is only limited by the possibilities of what you can construct around it.

If I were to go downstairs and get Ray Bradbury's short stories collection, I'd remember K taking me to the library, extracting me from the modern literature shelves and walking me over to Sci Fi, where no-one ever went and saying 'here, read this, and this and this and this'. 'Meet Arthur C Clarke, this is Ray Bradbury and this is Philip K Dick who will remember it for you wholesale.' Vivid memories, and all around books.

So what do we take with us from our past? Are there memories concentrated in the dust between the pages of our old books?

When we open them and inhale, do we breathe in our past?

When we take these things with us, the books and the music and the paintings, is it because we know that years later, these things - the memories - are all that's left?

'And all of these moments just might find their way into my dreams tonight' - Jack Johnson, Better Together

Today if I look up I see blue sky. If I ignore the buildings and look at the sky, with its pillowy clouds I can imagine I'm in Africa. If I replace the brown of the buildings and the tall poplars with the mauve of the hills and msasa trees, I could be at home.

If I close my eyes I can smell the rain hitting dusty earth, rippling its sweet scent through my body. Sudden raindrops falling while the sun still shines. Thunderclouds towering into the sky and the desire to offer myself naked to the rain.

I can see the dust of winter, and the cold clear mornings. The blue sky stretching endlessly above and the ground covered with a thin layer of crackling frost. The sunlight, warming the earth as the day grows, the earth abruptly turning cold as the sun sets.

The smells of maize meal cooking over an open fire, air thick with smoke, the scents of animals and people intermingled. The smell of dust and shit and life.

I can see Africa, pious and pagan.

When I open them I can see blue sky again. 

'When we dance, angels will run and hide their wings' - Sting, When we Dance

When I was a girl I happened across Contemporary British & North American Verse, an anthology edited by Martin Booth, nestling amongst the crime and romances on my aunt's bookshelf.

In the wilds of Africa poetry isn't exactly encouraged as an outlet for expressing oneself, so I'm not sure where it came from, but there it was. Pristine and on the shelf. Left behind by someone's lover, maybe? Someone with a wider life?

Sure, we did poetry in school. Lots of Shakespeare, some Christina Rossetti, classics. Nothing contemporary. I think there was too much sex in contemporary verse for it to be allowed...

When I found this book I was surprised at the intensity of the language. I was astonished that contemporary song lyrics could be considered poetry.

I still have the book, which travelled with me through two marriages and four countries. I re-read it occasionally. I like poetry. I like it more when it's obscure. I like discovering things I think nobody knows about until I find that everyone does and I'm just late to the party.

Old favourites jump out at me.

Richard Brautigan's On the Elevator Going Down and Douglas Dunn's Young Women in Rollers. Ted Hughes' Bedtime Story and The Tractor. Brian Patten's A Blade of Grass. A Blade of Grass was the first real love poem I ever read that made sense, and it's still the poem I think of when I think of romantic love.

Of course, Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning is in there, and some Sylvia Plath, which I hurriedly skip over. There should be no Bee Boxes in my life.

Peter Redgrove's A Storm alarms me now, just as it did then.

He says:

Somebody is throttling that tree
By the way it's threshing about;
I'm glad it's no one I know, or me,
The head thrust back at the throat,

Green hair tumbled and cracking throat,

His thumbs drive into her windpipe,
She cannot cry out,
Only swishing and groaning: death swells ripe.

The light is dimming but the fight goes on.
Chips strike my window. In the morning, there
Stands the tree, still, bushy and calm,
Not as I saw it, twisted heel to ear.

But fluffed up, boughs chafing slightly.
What's become of her attacker?
I'm glad he's not mine or known to me,
Flipped to the ground, heel over ear:

She preens herself, with a soft bough-purr
Was he swallowed up, lip over ear?
He's gone anyway. The path is thick in her fur.
Am I a friend, may I walk near?

I find some pressed rose petals in my book from my very first love affair. They've faded to a deep brown, like a blood stain, and the colour has dissipated murkily into the surrounding pages. I can't remember who gave me this rose, but I must have loved him. For I kept its petals after it died.

Jeanette Winterson has a column on poetry critique on her website. She has reproduced some of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry. I've just added Rapture to my reading list.

Surely the rest of the collection can't be as good as this:

Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head.
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.

--- You, Carol Ann Duffy

'It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you' - Toto, Africa (also immortalised by SAB in a Castle beer advertisement)

Turn up your sound, I had trouble balancing it.

'When the feeling's right, I'm gonna stay all night, I'm gonna run to you.' - Bryan Adams, Run to You.

The one who I lost my virginity to? The one who was dating my girlfriend? The one who I slept with for a year before she found out?

Yes, that one. I think it's time to tell you more.

He's called Jono. Sexy name huh? And he is sexy.

Not over the top sexy like some of the other boys. Blond, a drinker, a smoker. He drinks too much and gets depressed and stubs out cigarettes on his palms. His hair flips forward over his face.  He has a way of saying 'Ash?' in this husky, smoke-coloured voice and my knees shake. He has a history. He's a bit of a bad boy. His ex is called Carolyn and I hear they did kinky things but I'm not sure what that means.

He smokes about 40 a day. He's 19. He has a little roll of fat on his tummy, just below the belly button, with little blond hairs on it. The little roll is from all the booze I guess. Not that I really notice. I'm too busy looking into his blue-grey eyes.

He dates Juliet. A tiny framed girl with dark hair and doe-eyes. A goth-chick waiting to happen. Complete contrast to me. Maybe that was the thrill. Or just easy sex, who knows.

The night I lose it is strange. We're in my cousin's room which is outside the house in an outbuilding and we're drinking vodka and cooldrink (like squash if you're English or limonade if you're Dutch). It would be vodka and Coke, but all the Coke is finished. He sits behind me while we listen to music and talk shit.

Bryan Adams is playing. We've got a Bryan Adams thing going on that year. He loves it. Every time he can he blasts the Bryan Adams. Especially Summer of '69 and One Night Love Affair. He tells me that this is my summer of '69. Reckless gets played over and over, and when we're drunk our teenage voices sing along to Heaven.

He drives a pale blue (or is it white?) Anglia with brown leather seats that go all the way back. He rolls it one night driving drunk on a straight road. Everyone laughs.

So we're sitting there on the bed and the room is full of people and then I feel a hand go down the back of my shorts. I keep drinking and I'm all the time I'm thinking. Then I feel him behind me and it's not his hand anymore. My shorts come down at the back and then suddenly I'm not a naive little girl anymore. In a room full of people so quietly. Just a gasp and ...

Then my uncle walks in and the cigarettes go out and the booze gets shuffled under the bed and my shorts are pulled up and the lights go off and there's no time to talk, just 'oh shit, we're not meant to be this drunk'.

Later that night I creep, quiet as a mouse, into his room and we finish it. I feel strange and new and I can't tell anyone.

This is my secret life.

In my secret life I'm fucking him in the car outside nightclubs while Juliet is inside dancing. At parties. In the dark in the street. Outside on the grass in the rain during a thunderstorm. In the pool, in the gazebo. On the couch watching stuffy British TV about lawyers. Does anyone really think we were staying up late at night to watch that? I'm 15!

For a good long while he just stays at my aunt's house, which is where I also live. His house is the other side of town and he works for my uncle so it's easier for him to sleep over.

He drinks too much vodka and falls asleep in the bath. My aunt sends me to knock on the door and wake him up. I can't go in, because this is not my secret life. I stand outside the door and talk to him. He comes out with his towel wrapped around him. I have to pretend I'm shy and I've never seen him naked. He bums smokes from my aunt and walks around in his towel for hours.

A year later I start working and just before my interview we have sex for pretty much the last time. We've been such good friends. It's not really sad when we stop, just strange and unusual.

My secret life had become a secret habit.

In 2007 I go on facebook and I look for him. I want to see if he got fat and old and grey, like everyone else did. I don't know why. He's better left blond and 19 but anyway, instead, I find another boy I slept with back then and we chat and he tells me 'oh, that... everyone knew, even Juliet'.

So much for my secret life.

Tell me, did you ever have a secret life?

Confess, even anonymously if you like.

'here I am again beginning at another end there's no turning back this time.' - Beth Hart, Easy

Ack. What was I thinking? Tell me I didn't do that?

Oh too bad. I did.

So it's the first day of the next 365 days of my life.

Do I feel any different than yesterday? Not really.

Sometimes I wonder why we separate our lives into these compartments.

Today being a new day, the first day of forever, the day that we will change, do something different, be someone different.

Someone told me once that if you want to get rid of a bad habit imagine an animal doing it.

So for smoking you'd imagine a cat smoking. Or an elephant drinking.

But then I told him about how in Africa elephants get drunk by eating the fermented fruits of the Marula tree and then they too behave terribly badly. So the argument kind of fell a little flat.

Of course, it's all apparently a hoax and was staged in Animals are Beautiful People so that didn't really work, but at the time it was funny.

People also drink a liqueur with the fruits of the Marula tree and get drunk, but they are not as funny as elephants when they're tipsy.

Amarula tastes really nice though, go try it.

Okay, let's leave the liqueur on the shelf and get back to the animals making lists and separating their life into days, months and years and having goals.

Ridiculous isn't it?

Here are two excerpts from pieces I wrote in 2007, that help me remember to lie back, watch the sun rise and set, and not make lists.

About a holiday in France:

"Vittel is beautiful, a slightly dilapidated stately old spa town. There are baroque building and then Art Deco in the newer buildings. I didn't know that Nancy, just up the road, was the starting point for much of the Art Deco movement. It's all quite beautiful in a bit of a neglected way. In Holland everything is manicured and structured. As you cross the border into Belgium the difference is immediately apparent. I'm not sure which I prefer, but the ever-so-gently down-at-heel surroundings in Vittel are charming.

I was reminded of my childhood in Africa when we had cocktails before dinner last night, sitting out on the lawn, with a velvety blue sky above us and acres of green in front of us, fringed with enormous trees. Ahh."

About living in the Netherlands:

"It seems more earnest when people ask me, shock-struck faces agape, why anyone would exchange Africa's immense beauty for Holland.

I react almost angrily in my defense of the beauty of the Netherlands. I say 'but Holland is beautiful too, in a different way!' They negate my reaction and I get angrier.

I remind them of its polders, canals, tall poplars across the polders, marching rows of windmills turning in white brilliance, coloured stripes of tulips across the landscape. They tell me about Table Bay, the plains, lions, giraffes. I counter and so we go on."