The salad days of midlife

Taking pleasure where I find it

Still Life with Fruit and Vegetables, ca. 1602, Juan Sánchez Cotán

I am eating a delicious salad while I write this. I love a good salad and won’t touch a bad one. One evening not long ago, when I’d made a good salad to go with dinner, David turned to me and said, “You know you’re a grownup when you get really excited about a salad.” Lucian, chomping on his slices of cucumber kept carefully separate from his slices of red pepper and carrot, no dressing, concurred with teenaged disdain: “Uh huh.” I guess enjoying a good salad is one of the perks of being an adult.

The salad I’m eating comes from a little place downtown called “Gorgers.” Mostly they sell subs. Christina Mead ate this salad earlier this week and strongly recommended it, so today when I was downtown and leaving my workout, which happens in a little fourth-floor studio above Gorgers, I decided I would skip preparing lunch and instead eat a salad and write.

A salad doesn’t have to be fancy to be good. The salad I’m eating out of a brown takeout box has chopped romaine lettuce, slices of red onion, sliced tomato, black beans, American cheese, crispy bacon, cilantro, and a delicious creamy salad dressing with chipotle. The American cheese might seem pedestrian, but it is really delicious in this salad. Snobbery has no place in salad enjoyment. Neither do misguided concerns over health. (If you’re worried that you’re eating too much fat, for example, you’re not worried about your health, you just don’t want to have a fat body.) I would like to say something dramatic like “the health food movement killed the salad,” but it likely brought us delicious salady items like freekah (a tender chewy grain) and marinated pressed tofu, so I can’t condemn the whole thing. Just stay away from those gloppy “fat-free” bottled salad dressings. (The Moosewood Restaurant, no doubt part of the “health food movement,” served a delicious, very crisp and fresh side salad with all its meals.)

I’d love to be a food writer in the same sense I’d love to be a dance writer, which is to say, I love good food writing, and I love good dance writing, but I’ve never written anything in either vein. I’d like to be a food writer or I’d like to write enticingly about food in my fiction. There is nothing like a good food scene in literature. It gives me so much pleasure. I just finished reading Banana Yoshimoto’s novella Kitchen, which is less about food than the title suggests—it’s really about death—and the simple descriptions of tea and rice and soupy noodles nourish and comfort. The writing is mostly about the interior life of Mikage, the protagonist, and both main characters experience tremendous loss—there is a great swirl of feeling and nuanced descriptions of emotional experience—but as readers we are returned to the bodily lives of the characters with each cup of tea: routine, common, and necessary.

This morning I was served a cup of tea by my friend Kathy Lucas. Kathy is one of my favorite people; we really vibe. We had a workout together—she is my personal trainer, and a genius at it—and then I sat down on the fluffy white rug in her office and drank a cup of green tea with rose petals. I was so charmed to be served tea. And it was delicious—slightly bitter, lightly fragrant. I drank the tea from a mug with a picture of Nina Simone on it, and then I left and bought my salad, and then I came home to eat and write.

After my writing retreat in early February, I had a productive 4-6 weeks of writing, and then I had to take some time off (a trip to the city! a birthday! a week of David out of the country!), and I hit a creative wall. I’m at the place in a large fiction project where I have lots of raw material—so many words—and I don’t yet know how to shape the clay into a vase, the words into a story. This might be where an MFA, or some kind of instruction, would come in handy. When I announced at dinner the other night that the writing is barely coming along, Lucian asked if I’d been writing this newsletter. “No,” I replied. “First I was working hard on the novel, and then I stopped writing altogether.” He nodded. “You should start there,” he said. “With a newsletter.”

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• There is a newsletter about salad—of course there is—written by the food writer Emily Nunn. I want to become a paid subscriber, but I already pay for three newsletters, which is about all I can do. Anyway, there are free posts, too, so I recommend the delightful Department of Salad.

• “Musicians and cooks are responsible for the most pleasure in human life. Music makes people happier, and it doesn’t harm them. Most things that make you feel better are harmful. It’s very unusual. It’s like a drug that doesn’t kill you.” —Fran Leibowitz, “Pretend It’s A City”

• We saw Hadestown on Broadway over the February break. It’s a musical retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, also featuring Persephone, Hades, and Hermes. Highly recommended. We all loved it.

• Speaking of music, I’m preparing for the Odyssey choir’s spring concert with weekly rehearsals. Our director extraordinaire, Melissa Rooklidge, has written a piece based on a poem by Alice Meynell (1847-1922). It’s so lovely. I have also attended my first master class for piano, which was a humbling experience; the first student to play was about 8 years old and perhaps a prodigy. He played beautifully, wearing a three piece suit and a bow tie, and then returned to his seat, where his mother wiped his nose. I’m preparing two pieces for the spring piano recitals. Lucian is working on a composition based on Marc Chagall’s 1915 painting “The Mirror” and attending a cello jam session in Rochester this weekend, as well as a master class here in Ithaca. Do I need to tell you how much I love the Opus Ithaca School of Music? I love it a lot.

• David got to spend a week in Korea for work. He came back with Korean skin care for me, and a beautiful fan, and a bag of pollack chips someone had given him. I am loving the Green Tea serum and the Rice + Probiotics facial sunscreen, both by Beauty of Joeson, a brand I first learned about from Gothamista. The sunscreen might be my favorite sunscreen ever: odorless, light, gentle, and it imparts a glow to the skin. Beauty of Joeson is available in the U.S. through the import site Stylevana.

• I’m shopping for spring clothes, in Ithaca, which means I’m engaged in the ritual of online orders and returns. I can’t imagine being someone who really enjoys visiting shops and trying things on, or shopping the best sales, and then moving to Ithaca. You’d be bereft. Anyway, I’m looking for wide-legged jeans, orange pants, some tees, and a lightweight cardigan in a good color yet to be determined. The key with online shopping is not to settle for a bad fit just because you don’t want to bother with returning things. Return things.