Love in the morning

Apparently there's a thriving market for heart-shaped pancake rings out there.  My local grocery store keeps a stack of them in the "Baking Needs" aisle, between the pancake mixes and the flavored syrups.

I am wondering whether this has anything to do with the well-documented biology of our natural pre-dawn hormonal surges.  Is breakfast the ideal time to declare our love?  Do deep feelings anchor better with a stack of steamy pancakes drenched in maple syrup?  Do beloved pancake eaters swoon with gratitude at the sight of the cute little hearts?  Or do they come to expect the pancake treatment on a regular basis? 

Is this a once-in-a-blue moon gimmick or is there such an art as creative pancake-making?  And why hasn't anyone invented the heart-shaped pop tart yet? 

Do pancake-bound relationships stick longer?  Is this worth the investment?

The most I ever achieved in terms of breakfast lovefest was to learn my sweetheart's Starbucks drink order.  And since he's downgraded from the grande five-pump-no-whip-decaf-mocha to the plain tall decaf, I've had it extra easy lately.  Perhaps our relationship deserves better.

Tomorrow I'll tear his Starbucks paper cup sleeve into a heart shape.  See what that does to him and me.

Princess dreams

 I have been wondering about Michelle Obama. 

What must it be like to be living at the White House?  Drive with  body guards everywhere?  Sleep in a room full of furniture someone else picked long ago?

Every other presidential family seemed to have come with prior experience.  The Bush clan had been in politics for decades, the Clintons had lived in the Arkansas governor's house, the Regans were celebrities.  But the Obamas seemed to have been a regular family until now: mom, dad, the two kids and grandmother - folks with a regular house, jobs, responsibilities, the ability to make their own tuna sandwich for lunch.  At least that's what the press wants me to think.

What would it be like to not be able to go to the movies anymore?  Or the grocery store?  Or to my kid's ball games?  To have to worry about wandering into the kitchen in my jammies at night?  To be photographed all the time?  Listened to?  Watched?  Commented upon?  To have redeemed my personal freedom and that of my family for my husband's career? 

I watched the inauguration last week, all alone in front of the small TV set in my son's room.  After the oath, I stood up and clapped and wished the new President and his family well.   They'll need it.  I am not sure that my clapping made any difference but I like to think it added to the general buoyancy of the day. 

That night, I caught a glimpse of the first ball over the internet.  I saw the President dancing with his wife.  They looked happy and normal.  Then a photograph was released showing the President and first lady before that ball.  They were riding a freight elevator.  She was cold so, like any other husband, he had taken off his jacket to cover her shoulders.  

It's a lovely picture.  It's the middle-age version of the princess story.

"See," that picture says, "if your husband were the president, he would still love you, put his jacket on your shoulder, be madly in love with you and treat you like a princess." Sounds good to me.  But my sweetheart put a blanket over my shoulders when I was napping this afternoon.  And since he's not the President we got to go to the grocery store together without our small army of secret servicemen parting the crowds before us.  And I'll get to sleep in the safety of near-total anonymity tonight. 

Maybe we could repaint the house white and leave it at that. 

7 resolutions

Enough with with the revelries and boisterous carroling.  Let's swallow the last of the chocolate truffles and get down to business.  It's January 4th for God's sake!  Time for the perennial resolutions. 

I read an article in the grocery line advising readers to stick to just 7 New Year resolutions.  More than that is wasteful thinking bound for premature failure. 

Here are my seven:

7. I will finish the family-size box of oatmeal that's been in the pantry for 4 months.  This thing is big as a mother drum.  It should take me about 6 months to finish it off, just in time to make room for the canned goods we'll need for the next hurricane.

6. To balance out the oatmeal resolution, I will commit to drinking the two bottles of excellent red wine that my parents left behind. 

5.  I will submit my short stories and articles to print magazines.  Yes I will.  I am serious.  I mean it this time.

4.  I will put the caps back on the bottle of shampoo and the tube of toothpast every so often.  I can't commit to cap perfection but I am willing to exert occasional self discipline.   I hope this will show my beloved that I might make an acceptable mate. 

3.  I will stop folding laundry.  It will have to fold itself. 

2. I will send my brother's birthday card on time .  I only have one brother and even though we don't see much of each other, I care about him.  What's this business about forgetting his birthday, those lame jokes about "better late than never"?  My brother rides a red tractor in the French countryside.  He has a horse, a nice house with cherry trees and he drives too fast on the freeway; he's a cool dude.  I will email him for no good reason, see what happens.

1. I will be grateful for my beloved, what a good man he is.  I will be grateful for my children, for his, for our parents, our family, our large circle of friends.  It's been a good Christmas.  We'll have a good year.  I can feel it in my bones.

Clockwork

 For Christmas, my beloved gave me a thoughtful Zen alarm clock that will wake me up in harmony with my natural sleep cycle.

All well and good but clocks make me nervous.  I have not worn a watch in years.  I've been known to obscure my car's digital clock with duct tape and to remove the computer clock from the bottom toolbar.  There's no clock on the night-table because glancing at my bedtime propels me into fits of sleep-cycle anxiety.  (What if it is past midnight and I don't get my 8 hours by morning?  If I turn in by 9 p.m., will I wake up at 4 a.m. only to crash and burn during the morning commute?  Will I stutter by noon?)

Had anyone else offered me the alarm clock, I could have expressed my gratitude, packed the thing in its pretty box and re-gifted.  Not so with my beloved's.

"Just put the clock on your night-table, tell him you like it and learn to live with it," my dad said.  "It's only a clock."   This was sensible advice that I couldn't take.  Wouldn't take.

It seemed easier to accuse my beloved of carelessness at Starbucks a couple of days later.  Why couldn't he have given me a silver bracelet like last year?   What was wrong with a foolproof pound of chocolate-covered coffee beans?  Didn't he read the letter to Santa that I had conveniently posted in this blog?  Did ANYONE read that letter by the way (because I am still waiting for those coffee beans)?  And how about flowers?  Knitting needles? Soap? Bath towels?  A keychain?  Lovely things that wouldn't tell time and wouldn't mess with my life.  Things that wouldn't require me to change or consider someone else's opinion of agreeable bedtime routines.   Romantic things, hundreds of them, that I fully deserved.  Things that would effortlessly allow me to be the gracious, grateful, loving girlfriend that I wished to be?  And why was HE making my life so difficult?  Hand't HE heard of Christmas being a joyful holiday?

I know my beloved loves me because, although all red and upset-looking, he didn't whack me over the head with a pound of Starbucks Verona coffee like he might have had a right to.

I hope he takes me back.

Cordon Bleu

Forty-five years of patience and hard-work but here I am: I've been admitted into our family's culinary hall of fame.

This is a tiny but exclusive matrilineal society which includes my great grandmother Marguerite, my grandmother Marguerite, my mom Monique Marguerite and now me (just guess what my middle name is?)

Admission into the society is both arduous and elusive. Our women are possessive about their kitchens, secretive with their recipes and notoriously closed to advice.  The cook is in charge, you don't mess with the cook.  You might dice a carrot according to instructions, but you may neither taste her sauces nor comment on her seasoning.

But mom (who was in charge) agreed to my assistance this Christmas eve.  The guests were about to arrive and the bechamel sauce was refusing to thicken. 

"It's that American butter," said my mom.  "And that flour!  You just look at it and it clumps!"

Dad who suggested I be brought in as a semi-foreign consultant.  "Let Marie help you," he said.  "She's been here a long time, she might know what to do."  I did.  I started the bechamel using the old jar method that my friend Deborah had shown me long ago: put one tablespoon of flour in a jar with water, shake well and use as a fool-proof starter for sauces and gravy.  Works every time for godawful American gravy, should be o.k. for French sauces right? 

Once the bechamel took, mom and I worked on the seasoning together.  I grounded the pepper, she added the splash of calvados.  She tasted.  I stired.  She tasted dome more.  I stirred more.  We debated the timing of roasting apples for the chestnut-filled turkey.  I demonstrated the use of my cool American broiler to "au-gratin" the ramequins of Coquilles St. Jacques.   She lavished more calvados on the roasted apples.

We toasted with champagne.

Dad took a pic for posterity.