Shirley

Grandgirl, age 11 She and I are gazing into her loaded vanity drawers. “I got this from Mama,” she says, uncapping a lipstick, violent red. “I was poking through her makeup stuff. She just didn’t want it. She didn’t use it. ‘Hey, you don’t use this,’ I said. ‘Can I have it?’” “I’m going to use it for Halloween,” says Grandgirl. In all the memoirs, the child watches, bewitched, the mother at the mirror putting on her face. I missed out. Mine kept hers plain. Serenity played there and often worry, but not in high color. No filigreed tray on her dresser, no creams, shades in bottles, florid scents. No cherried lips, cheeks like perfect peaches, lids made plummy, ganache-dipped lashes. I.e., no do-overed femininity. Never mind every bad thing that might’ve signaled. Just, the deliciousness passed me by—the magic.    

Grandgirl, age 13 She draws and draws and draws and draws and draws. I pinch my eyes near shut, scrutinize the droves of pages, beam approval. You’re good, I say. Your stuff’s good. You need to get serious about this. But why weight her with praise, or prod? Let a child play.    

All Power to the Old Lady Yay for Matty, I say. Post release date, each episode in the new Matlock series is available for free online at CBS. Let’s just say the woman is a whiz. Compared to the Thelma in “Thelma,” Matty might not be a Christian, as she lies maniacally. (Though, I’ve changed my whole mind about what a Christian is, have you? Things out there in the world are getting crazier and crazier.) Otherwise, which of the two is superior is for you to decide. Thelma is the reallyreallyreally old one, if that helps any.

Oh, this perfectly perfect day— pure golden blue .  

Every so often, grandchildren at the table, I quote this rhyme from I don’t know where—   I eat my peas with honey I’ve done it all my life It makes my peas taste funny But it keeps them on my knife.   Maybe I’m hoping the finicky few (not saying who) will squelch their dread and just eat. I also, on occasion, lecture on the importance of rehearsing proper table manners. I point out how awful it would be to get invited to the palace to eat with the queen and then feel awkward and miserable at the table because they’d never learned how to conduct themselves in society. I tell the children how once, in a land far away, the county schools superintendent—whom we barely knew—had Paulson and me to dinner. (Our kids stayed home, uninvited.) Her husband served beef stroganoff with glistening, wide noodles. Slippery slippery. Sitting in the elegant dining room, trying to keep a composed look on my face, I kept steering them around the plate with my fork, sometimes snagging something...

Gaza, cont’d Wondrous and amazing, I texted to John this morning. Your moo-moos’ milk from twelve (12!) days ago is still good. Sweet as ever. I had some great Cheerios. He and Jennifer have cows. Every morning he slogs out there and robs them. He fills our half-gallon jar when we’re ready for fresh, and we drive over to collect it. We transfer it to two clinky glass bottles, easier for pouring. Shaqoura ’s people—evidently they do get milk. I guess flash dried, same as the peppers. He must’ve reconstituted it with some jugged water, if those are whole potfuls he’s dumping.    

Gaza, cont’d Well, we’re not whole-hog whole hoggers, ourselves—not the both of us. Paulson grows peas, for example, which actually taste like peas, but hardly any because I won’t help shell and freeze them. If you’ve ever stockpiled a crazy lot, you know why. The frozen from the store aren’t bad. The fields, anyhow, weren’t bombed. We buy canned, too—I love canned peas. Don’t act so horrified. They carry a special sweetness and when warmed pop softly against the teeth.    

Gaza, cont’d The odd part is, nobody else worried over green beans this summer. Not a one—not the daughter, not the sons. They moved blithely from spring to summer and into fall without a solitary green bean in their cellars from their own personal soil. I heard complaints last winter about a terrible batch of Costco green beans, but nobody planted their own. They seem not to have turned into whole-hog gardeners. Where did we go wrong? How could we fail like this?

Gaza, cont’d Is that peppers Shaqoura is pitching into the pot , in his TikTok? Nobody’s going around picking peppers, surely. Dehydrated, I guess. Flash dried, they’ll keep their green pretty well, I guess. Here there’s enough of a glut that we’re letting them go red and rot on their stalks. A few months back I was desperate for green beans. That’s how I felt. We’d run out—no more in the freezer. Paulson planted a bigger-than-usual patch, but then the bunnies visited, causing me additional agitation. He closed off the rows with chicken fencing and electric wire, though, and we got bagsandbagsandbags socked away. At issue now is the cabbage. Little heads are coming, botchy-looking things, and if they’re too bored through by worms I’ll have to resort to the store binfuls, what a blow. I know—I don’t know desperate. I just really want cabbage, a copious perfectly green-as-green crop.    

Update , o r More Thieving from Time M a gazine Now here’s some internet food worth staring at. Also, check out this video .  

Framed-art tour, exhibit 11 (It’s not about the onions.) Don’t trust “should,” she writes. Wherever it’s hiding, there’s a germ. It infects. It festers. She says it better. The Mennonite shoulds and should nots wormed deep, chewed up my insides. It doesn’t seem like Ginnie suffered like that in our girlhoods. I’m not sure why. It might be genetic, the DNA’s random twists and turns—our disparate dispositions.    

A Three-Piece Collection At a family get-together, my niece’s sweet hand-sewn giveaways laid out on the floor, I chose the braids (1). But I’ve barely worn my Zo ë booty—I keep forgetting. The black-and-gold bands (2), also a gift, came strung with a chunky-looking something I took off. I vacillate about wearing them. I don’t know how to say this without sounding stupider than ever: they make it look too much like I’m trying. I am. They’re snake-y. They jazz things up. They fend off starkness. The overblown beadsandbeadsandbeads thing (3) from Gift & Thrift is more of a joke. Greta wore it in the play we did. Overblown was the point. The necklace from Pat—I don’t know where it went. Did it slide off the picture frame I hung it on, down into the wastebasket? Or did one of my grandgirls snitch it? On a pair of tiny bars: the words that came from the mouth of the majority leader in the mostly empty Senate chamber after he tried to shut down Elizabeth Warren. Nevertheless, she pe...