Day 572, January 25, 2022

Hope

What I love best about my job, is that at its core, it is about helping people. But there are limits, limitations to what the human body, the human psyche can endure, and people fail. I forget things, emails get buried, and eventually there are less hours in the day. Some people are helped in little ways, and some people are lost. There isn’t really time to dwell too much on how things parse out. 

There is a book of short stories a friend of mine wrote. I have been savoring it, purposely not reading the last story in the collection so the flavor lingers on the top of the coffee table like a slice of tiramisu left out overnight. I’m not quite ready to let it go. I haven’t seen her for many years, but once we were close and I imagined we would be friends for a long time, so reading her stories is like catching up, but the book has sat on the table untouched for months now, after many other books have cycled through. It could be mistaken for neglect.

Walking up the steep hill to my parking lot, the muscles in my neck were pulling taut against bone and sinew, the cold nearly drawing my body asunder. It feels like a weakness, an infirmity, a flaw in design or evolution. I was wearing so many layers, I cannot imagine making myself warmer. I want to lie down on a hot sand beach. I want to eat a popsicle after mowing the lawn. I want someone to whisper something in my ear about porches and chairs.

A friend told me the word of the year was hope. I thought it felt like an Obama advertisement, but I didn’t say so. I mean, it is not so bad to remember such optimism. I remember a friend’s cancer seemed like a thing you could ignore, traffic seemed to stop in an embrace, and standing in icy water for a photo op seemed all in good fun. 

I used to eat ice cream on a regular basis, sprinkled with sliced almonds fresh from the toaster oven. If we opened a store it would be called, Hot Nuts. I also used to eat the dried red peppers in General Tso’s, and the stuffed jalapeños at Good and Healthy. I wonder if gastronomical insults are cumulative, over the years, for far too long, like smoking cigarettes or waking in too tight shoes, the result is permanent.

My favorite memory is of my father tending the barbecue as the bulgogi cooked. My mom at the kitchen counter preparing the rest of the dinner. No, it is homemade kimbap at the beach, the grains of sand inevitably getting in the rice regardless of how careful I tried to be. Sitting at the dining room table in Quincy excited for the box of powdered mashed potatoes to be ready, mostly a treat because of the melted butter and salt. A Chinese restaurant in Chinatown with the beaded curtain to the restrooms. Everything always smelled faintly of the disinfectant puck in the urinal. My brother and I would mix packets of sugar in the glasses of water. 

I wish I could do anything so good as to remember it someday as something wonderful.

A chicken warm egg on one of the coldest nights of the year.

This morning in the UMass permaculture garden.