Maybe You're In Quarters

Recently, we lost a friend named Ray Gish. He was one of the most delicious malcontents I’ve ever met, with a grin that the word “sly” was invented to describe, and a heart the size of a container ship. He was one of the owners of Commonwealth in Brooklyn — one of the very first places in that city that ever felt like home to me. He left behind a partner named Stephen: one of the gentlest, and most quietly hilarious people I’ve ever met, who said on the internet the other day, “I want to hear him say everything he ever said to me again.”

If there is any tenderness within you, and I suspect there is a lot, there’s pretty much no way that sentiment doesn’t crack you in half. Or maybe you’re in quarters now, after the year in the world we’ve all just had. It’s a sentiment I understand well, as someone who recently rediscovered that there is still a live YouTube link of my dad explaining what a blog is in 2007.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Marc Orchant this week, in the way I always do when the world is at its worst — feeling both grateful that he doesn’t have to see it, and desperate to know what he would have thought. I, like many other terminally online people hoping to preserve some shred of sanity, finally left the platform formerly known as Twitter and wandered, bleary-eyed, over to Bluesky. Flynn, of course, already did this like a year ago. My father would have already been there too, always ready to adopt the next best thing, especially when idiots and fascists get involved. I will not miss them.

Thinking about this reminded me of something I wrote years ago, with no particular destination, just because I needed it to get out of my head. It’s about my dad, and the ways we miss people when there are technological reminders of them all around us, and it is, somewhat ridiculously, from the disorienting days just after the first time this country elected one of the stupidest and most narcissistic people on earth. In some ways, it’s a comfort to still have a record of some of his most casual words, because I do want to hear him say everything he ever said to me again, most especially the dumb little nothings in between.

“Lots to Do Before I Go"

“I’m going to try really hard not to be a completely maudlin freak this week,” I squeaked out this morning. “But I also don’t want to just...” Here, I made a motion that was like sliding an empty plate away from you at a big table.

“I know,” he said. “It’s ten. It’s understandable.”

Today is December 1st, 2017. It’s been ten years since my dad’s last day on earth. He didn’t die until December 9th, but the 1st was his last full day with his eyes open, his brain functioning like it was supposed to, and his heels hopping slightly off the ground when he took his signature long stride around a space.

I woke up this morning just before dawn without meaning to, which is something I’ve never done in my life until this year. Right now, on the first day of December on Cape Cod, light doesn’t start to creep in around the edges until well after 6:00am, and I tried to convince myself to close my eyes again, and see if I could continue the dream I was having about lecturing a conference room full of men on how to better advocate for the sexual health and liberation of the women in their lives (I don’t know, it’s been a weird few months in America).

Just as my eyes were about to succumb to this demand, my husband’s alarm went off, softly humming into the wooden dresser. He was trying to convince himself to take a walk in the dunes at daybreak -- now, before the temperature inevitably drops into the twenties in a few weeks. He rustled, hit snooze, and I curled my body around his long torso. He got a text message from the friend he was supposed to meet in the dunes.

“It’s raining and she feels like shit,” he said. I shoved my legs in between his and listened to the rain fall on the roof, and the soft glug-glug-glug of rain gutters that need to be cleared. Surely, sleep was gunning for both of us shortly.

Instead, that thought from before popped into my head. December 1st, 2007. What was the weather like in Albuquerque on December 1st, 2007? My father, a perpetually early riser, would have been up, the black Mr. Coffee bubbling the pot of bitter chicory hellfire that would fuel his morning, consumed solely by him in a house of tea-drinking charlatans.

When I was young, my dad would make me a grilled cheese every morning for breakfast, since I pretty much ignored all other breakfast foods until I was old enough to drink at brunch. There were two versions of this, depending on the pace of our morning and how early I’d been able to drag my unwilling little body out of bed. He was the only morning person in a house full of nightowls. The most frequent grilled cheese was quick and dirty -- two pieces of toast in the toaster, American cheese in between, tossed in the microwave until the cheese melted, cut into four squares. I tolerated this grilled cheese, but it was not the grilled cheese I loved.

The second, and far superior version happened on weekend mornings, or as a reward for getting up on time and finishing my homework with him at the table while he read the newspaper. This grilled cheese was browned in butter in a frying pan on the stove, with Muenster cheese -- enough Muenster cheese that it would ooze out the sides and make a cat’s cradle of cheese bridges when I bit into it -- cut diagonally into two triangles. On these mornings, his breakfast would be the orange-rinded heel of this salty, squeaky, ersatz product of American exceptionalism. Cheese for breakfast made sense to me. Coffee would take longer for me to figure out.

I have no idea what my dad ate for breakfast on December 1st, 2007.

He kept the house quiet in the morning. In 2007 it was just he, my mom and my brother living there. He would have only turned on the kitchen light and the dim lamp above the desk in the living room. He might have listened to Miles Davis or Grateful Dead bootlegs or a productivity podcast on his headphones while he drank his coffee and read the news. He still got the newspaper every day, but had always advocated for the electronic versions of things -- he was always the earliest adopter in my life of handheld devices, tablets, e-readers, wireless keyboards and crazy new space phones without buttons.

On December 1st, 2007, my dad tweeted thirteen times.

That my father was on Twitter in 2007 shouldn’t surprise you. December 1st, 2007 is also the day he announced he was leaving Facebook for good, after realizing their privacy practices, data mining, and potentially disentangleable reach into our lives was unethical and scary. My dad’s first tweet on December 1st, 2007 was at 11:05 am.

“Road trip next week - CA and Seattle. Lots to do before I go.”

I won’t let myself think about where he was at 11:05 am on December 2nd, 2007. At least not right now. Right now it is still December 1st, and it makes me burst into tears at the breakfast table, just thinking about how excited he was for his future ten years ago. He was about to start the job he’d always wanted -- evangelizing for a productivity guru and personal hero -- traveling back and forth between Ojai, California and their home in Albuquerque. After working with a particularly articulate tenacity for all of his life in different office buildings, for different people, fixing different problems without enough credit or pay, he’d finally gotten to the point where he could take my mother on a long road trip en route to a business meeting. Where they could comfortably think about sending my little brother to a decent liberal arts college out of state. My mother bought a pair of Vans with sugar skulls on them in a fancy mall in southern California and texted me a picture from the limo that picked her up.

“Isn’t this ridiculous?” she balked. “These people are so weird.”

On the afternoon of December 1st, 2007, my father and I had our last conversation. Well, it was the last conversation he participated in, at least. I was standing in my kitchen, downtown. Sean and I lived in the kind of gut-renovated loft apartment that took over abandoned high schools, paper mills and sugar factories in the early 2000s. The original hardwood floors and 20-foot windows were preserved, the rest torn out and converted into open floor plan, modernized, hipster enclaves. I think we paid $485 a month. My dad was on the phone, asking me to make plans to have dinner with he and my mother the next night. I, knowing that the night of December 1st, 2007 would be spent at a joint birthday party for two of the most enthusiastic whiskey drinkers in modern history, was trying to be realistic but optimistic and didn’t quite commit. I was trying to figure out what to make for dinner to make sure we didn’t feel awful the next day. I remember, distinctly, that I was looking into the refrigerator as we wrapped up our call.

“I love you,” he said.

“Love you, too,” I always responded. We’d never agreed on it or anything -- at least I didn’t think so -- but my parents, my brother and I have never ended a telephone conversation without being sure to say this to each other. (Although I probably hung up on them once or twice as a teenager, of course.)

It’s of some small comfort to me that those are the last words I can be sure he heard me say. Pretty small.

This wasn’t by accident, of course. The particular trappings of the low-key anxiety that has always plagued my brain made it so that I spent a lot of my childhood imagining how it would feel if my parents were dead. Not that I wanted them to be, far from it -- but there was something about imagining how I’d react in the most terrible scenario that I could think of that helped me feel more prepared for smaller battles. In my mind, however, it was always a car accident. And it was always both of them. I’d never prepared myself for the fact that my brother and I would have to figure out how to help the one left behind, rather than just trying to save each other.

I tell people that I love them as soon as I know it, and then I make sure I do it before we leave each other, no matter what. I’m free with it -- both in the saying of it and the feeling of it. Because you actually never know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Or in five minutes. And it’s better to know that you gave them everything you could.

The Twitter record of my dad’s last real day on earth tells me that he set up a Tumblr he never used. He commiserated with a friend whose luggage was lost while traveling. “Get some rest pal,” he told her tenderly. Pal was his signature pet name for those of us he was trying to protect and support. He lamented that he’d paid too much for a software upgrade right before a sale, because he just couldn’t wait -- a familiar coda in the grievances of our early adopter.

At 3:53 pm on December 1st, 2007, he tweeted “To all my Twitter friends - you're still my friend but Facebook is not. So don't take it personally that I removed you.” He posted a link to a blog he’d written about it at 4:20pm. You can’t read it now, because the site he posted it for went belly-up shortly after his death. He was the gravity that held so many different orbits together.

At 5:53 pm, “@technosailor - keep it up Aaron! I'm proud of you! I know how hard it is to quit the habit.”

This all took place during a time before likes and retweets and quoted tweets and threaded tweets and 280 godforsaken characters, which means that I have no idea what this was in reference to. But I know that he loved that person, and was proud of them for quitting smoking, which was a battle my dad fought for most of my life. This was the last tweet of my dad’s life.

I have no idea what my dad ate for dinner on December 1st, 2007, and I wonder what it would have been if he’d known it was going to be his last one.

Sean and I both just got our updated Covid vaccines and our flu shots on the same day. Usually that makes us both feel like we got hit by a truck the next day, so we made some chicken soup in advance for our weary bodies. But I also decided that I was going to need to have this simmering on the stove all day, so here we go. My brain was so scattered in the grocery store that was (due to a transportation systems failure) nearly completely empty, that I absolutely forgot to get leeks. It was still delicious. This makes enough for an army, and leaves you with a mountain of delicious leftovers, if you’re just two aching souls.

Pot au Feu
adapted from Saveur Magazine’s recipe

1 - 2 lb. bone-in beef short ribs
2½ lb. chuck roast, tied
3 carrots, peeled and trimmed
2 parsnips, peeled and trimmed
2 turnips, peeled and trimmed
2 leeks, trimmed, cleaned, and halved crosswise
2 medium onions
1 small Savoy cabbage, quartered
3 parsley sprigs
3 black peppercorns
1 bay leaf
2 garlic cloves, peeled
About a wine glass of red wine
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
6 medium waxy potatoes, peeled

To a large pot, add the beef short ribs, and chuck roast. Season with salt, and splash the wine over while you prep the vegetables. Add the carrots, parsnips, turnips, leeks, onions, and cabbage. Using twine, tie the parsley, peppercorns, bay leaf, and garlic in a piece of cheesecloth and add to the pot. (Honestly, I just threw them all in — no one is looking.) Add enough cold water to cover the meat and vegetables, and bring to a boil.

Turn the heat to medium and simmer, skimming any foam that rises to the surface, until the meat is nearly cooked, about 1½ hours. Add the potatoes and simmer until the meat flakes easily when pierced with a fork, about 1 hour more. Season to taste with salt and black pepper.

For the first course, using a ladle, strain some of the broth into four soup bowls. For the second course, use a spider skimmer to transfer the vegetables and short ribs to one side of a large warmed platter. Transfer the roast to a cutting board, discard the twine, and slice thickly. Place meat and any accumulated juices on the other side of the platter, then ladle some of the remaining broth over the top. (Strain any remaining broth and reserve for another use.)

They serve their recipe with homemade sauce gribiche and tomato sauce. In my condition, the best I could do was to whip together some djion and mayo with a few capers. It worked exactly right. I love you, pal. Drink some water.