Becoming the Storm
53 A New Season
IN SPITE OF ASKING for no celebration of her twenty-second birthday, I did go with Angela to her mother’s house for dinner Wednesday night. We had a very quiet meal with a small birthday cake and then Angela and I sat together in the living room with our books spread out as we studied. Even after four years of preparation, I think the reality of med school was hitting her harder than she expected. It was nearly midnight when I closed my books and looked over at her. A big textbook was open in her lap, but I don’t think she could see it through the tears in her eyes. I slid over on the couch to put my arm around her and she lay her head on my shoulder.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just petted her hair as she quietly cried.
“Will you help find someone to manage the garden?” she finally asked.
“Of course I will,” I said. “It’s fall. We won’t have to worry about that until spring.”
“You know better than that, Brian. There are still a ton of crops that will have to be brought in. There are the squash, most of the dry beans, the pumpkins. There are still zucchini and even tomatoes. The last batch of carrots and the potatoes need to be harvested. If we can till the mulch and compost in before it freezes, we can get a better jump on the season next spring. We won’t be hampered by the wet as much. But it will need to be spread with straw to keep the late season weeds down. There’s so much to do,” she moaned. “And I can’t.”
“Brenda’s been your right hand in the garden. Do you think she can handle it?”
“She’s great at doing things, but she’s never really been part of the planning. She just likes to work in it.”
“Who do you suggest?”
“Maribelle knows even more about gardening than I do,” Angela said. “But she has her own garden, the store, and her health to be concerned with.”
“Maybe she’d be willing to do the planning and scheduling for both gardens while we provide the labor for actually doing the work. I’ll ask around and see if anyone else is up to the challenge.”
“I don’t want to let everyone down.”
“That sounds like one of my lines,” I laughed.
“I learned from a master.”
“Honey, do you want to be a doctor?”
“More than anything in the world.”
“Then that is what you need to focus on. Everyone on the ranch will support you in any way we can.”
“I’ll try to stay out of everyone’s way.”
“Listen to me. If you need the quiet and privacy here at your mother’s house, then come here. But don’t leave the big house for our sake. If you need a room of your own, we can arrange that, too,” I said.
“Do you mean it, Brian? I wouldn’t need much space. I just have to not have distractions while I’m trying to learn this stuff. One day a life could depend on it.”
Well, that summed it all up. It wasn’t just her dream, but it was truly wanting to be the best doctor she could be. She wanted to save lives. And one day, she would be that doctor. We’d all make sure of it.
Labor Day. We were all in a tizzy. The studio was packed. It was our first joint show. I liked it because I didn’t have to fill a full half hour. Elaine liked it because she had more than one guest. We started taping at nine. Everyone would be gone by noon. We’d review and edit the tapes and then feed the hour-long program out to our syndicate at three o’clock and again at five o’clock. Elaine was primed and so was I.
ELAINE: If you could take a pill and know that you would never again be hungry, but that you could never again eat, would you take the pill? It’s a philosophy question. Or is it a biology question? I get those two confused. Think about the implications. The solution to world hunger. One pill. Take it and you would never be hungry again. And if you are never hungry again, why would not eating ever be a problem? You could probably still enjoy the smell of sautéing onions or a steak on the grill. You could still enjoy looking at incredible meals, tastefully arranged on a china plate.
Maybe you could still take a bite of food, chew it so you enjoy the flavor, and then spit it into a bucket like wine tasters do at a tasting. If it doesn’t make it to your stomach, certainly it doesn’t count as eating.
It’s dinner time! Let’s all gather around the table and smell the food! Look how beautifully it has been arranged on the plate. Look how the chef streaked the fish with aioli. The lovely contrast between the green asparagus and the orange carrots. Savor the flavor as your perfectly cooked steak seems to melt in your mouth.
And then spit it out.
You aren’t hungry and you can’t actually swallow food. Consider it. Science could do this.
The world would be a much neater place, wouldn’t it? No poop! How long would it take us to create smellaurants instead of restaurants? [snooty accent] Zee chef’s special zis evening is zee delightful aroma of Peking Duck. Yust smell dis. Heeere. I vill paint your tongue wis zee flavor. Zat vill be serty-seven dollars.
Would you do it? Isn’t there anything else important about food and eating?
Let me ask it this way. If you could take a pill that would give you a mind-blowing orgasm on demand, but you could never have sex, would you take it? Of course! Think how neat that would be. I’m really stressed out. But I took the pill! Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. That was so good!
And so neat. I didn’t even get my panties wet.
Would you take the pill? Just think, no more divorce over sexual incompatibility. I took the pill. No more infidelity. I took the pill! Stamp out STDs! Take the pill.
Taking the pill together has shown me how much I love you and want to spend my life with you. Take the pill! [wiggles hips back and forth with face scrunched up.] Something’s missing.
Because food is like sex.
We don’t eat just because we’re hungry. We eat for the pleasure of the food, the company, the conversation. If you only eat because you are hungry, take the pill! I eat so I can gaze longingly into my boyfriend’s eyes. I eat so my hearthmates and I can talk about our day together. I eat for the excitement, the flavor, the social interaction. Few of us eat only because we are hungry.
Yet all too many of us have sex just for the orgasm. Take the pill.
It was fun to have Bill and Crystal down from Kokomo to talk about food from the perspective of the restaurant industry. Then Elaine interviewed a home economics teacher from a high school in Indianapolis. What a difference in opinions about food. She was trying to teach her kids how to prepare nutritious menus on a budget. And it seemed like she was doing a good job of it. Then it was my turn.
ME: It’s fun to have both Bill Price of the Tally Ho Restaurant in Kokomo and Emily Carson of Ben Davis High School in Indianapolis with me today. We’re going to talk about planning a meal at home while I fix an all-time favorite here at the ranch—meatloaf. I suppose this is a little low class for you, Bill. The Tally Ho is known for prime rib.
BILL: And chateaubriand. But you might be surprised to find that our daytime menu includes a lot of standard favorites like meatloaf.
EMILY: It might be a standard favorite to you, but in the inner city, a dish with that much meat would need to feed a family of four for at least three days. The focus on meat makes it a costly meal for many of the kids in our classes.
We were off and the conversation was lively. Emily was impressed by the amount of vegetables I put in the meatloaf and how I used oatmeal as an extender. Bill related it to the way they tried to serve economical meals at the table and wondered if I was going overboard when I chose to serve the meatloaf with a side of mixed vegetables as well as mashed potatoes, considering all the vegetables that were in the meatloaf itself. When we served it on a plate, we talked a little about the size of a portion of meat and the arrangement of vegetables on the plate. It was a basic meal, but we put a lot of thought into it.
A small table had been set in Elaine’s area and we sat at the meal when the audience was once again turned to face her set. She had a third guest, a professor of anthropology, who talked about the social aspects of eating together. She tracked the changes that were occurring in family life due to people no longer gathering around the table.
It was an exciting day.
As soon as we wrapped up and the show went into editing, I drove Nikki to the airport in Indianapolis so she could head back to school. Her classes would start on Wednesday. Technically, she should have been there the week before for graduate school orientation and to get her classroom set up. She’d be teaching a class in comic writing as well as working on her creative writing thesis. I guess things are a little different when you are doing an MFA instead of an MS. Her thesis was a novel. She had a class to teach, two to attend, and a novel to write by spring. Not to mention keeping a steady flow of new material coming for Elaine. Our new schedule of having a daily live show was going to keep us all on our toes.
Jennifer was taking on more responsibility with the show, focusing on audience management and special guests. She’d finished her marketing degree and had decided not to go for a master’s—at least not right away. We now had several full-time people working on the show and a few at part time. Sam was still Hannah’s associate producer, but her class schedule conflicted with the actual time on set. She was steadily gaining more mobility and strength in her left arm, but had physical therapy three times a week and exercises to do every day. This winter she’d have to undergo more surgery in an effort to repair the surface damage. She had a long, jagged scar and it just made me weep to see her beautiful skin so terribly torn up. Theresa had given us a cream to help soften and reduce the scarring. I made it a point to spend a few minutes each day applying the cream to Sam and to Dani.
The triplets were my staff on the Young Cooking segment of the show. Mary still handled a lot of the planning of themes and content, but she was two years behind us on her degree. Her class schedule didn’t allow her to be a daily participant on the show, so she did most of her work on weekends. The triplets, on the other hand, were in the kitchen before people started arriving for the show and had everything prepped and ready to go by the time we started taping. That included having dishes that needed long cooking times prepared in duplicate so I could put one batch in the oven and pull the dish out of the oven all finished thirty seconds later. I wasn’t sure how this would all pan out once their little café was ready to open in the spring, but it was great working with them and I had lots of opportunity in the prep kitchen to hold Dani and touch the child growing within her.
Of course, Hannah had April and Jason full time on cameras and had hired a third cameraman. Joyce had become a full-time employee, editing and mixing the tapes. Elaine worked hard in the morning in front of the cameras and spent her afternoons poring over newspapers and watching the television news and entertainment programs to get more material for her monologues. She had to prep and review who her guests were for the next day and decide how to interview them. She was working like a demon.
I had a good amount of reading to do for my classes, but found that I was spending much of my afternoon on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in the studio going over plans for the show and working on new contracts for Redress. The show was facing competition from half a dozen other fashion shows. Every network had one now. I wasn’t at all confident that the current format was going to continue to draw as much market share as it had in the past. Sarah was the research assistant I needed for Redress and she was out almost every week doing focus groups and surveys, or joining the crew for Redress onsite. I was glad we were able to work so closely together, even though she’d moved in with Lamar at Casa del Sol. I planned to attend The National Show in the spring. That was the big cable TV tradeshow. Cable was really changing the face of television.
On Tuesdays at three, my class was a basic grad school requirement called Introduction to Research Methods in Media. It had already proved helpful in directing me to different publications about media and entertainment. That was followed at five-thirty by Media Organizations, the class that Hannah and I shared. That was the fun part. The bulk of the class would be case studies of organizations and how they had faced programming and production challenges. Thursday at three o’clock was a companion class to Research Methods, taught by the same instructor—Philosophy of Inquiry in Telecommunications. It was a high-level class that tried to give a history of the impact of different media and its effect on society. It was followed by Telecommunications Theory that included a lot of general social scientific theories that apply across the board to any research project. In general, all four courses were stuff that just had to be covered by a grad student. I wouldn’t get much choice in my classes until next year.
Surprisingly, by the middle of September, we seemed to have hit a flow that enabled all of us to work together and survive. We’d set up a private room for Angela, and even though she was stressed with her classes and practicum, she really appreciated the support the casa gave her. For myself, I found I was spending fewer nights in the master bedroom and more in the communal bedroom upstairs. We liked being together. We liked it a lot.
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