Womanly Arts

The Weather Channel has whipped me into a state of hysteria over the coming storm and I respond to hysteria by throwing things away....if I have to flee I want everything to fit on my back to be fleet of foot..a  primal instinct going back to my genetic sojourn in the Steppes...and today I turned my eye to an entire shelf of cookbooks and torn-out-of-magazine recipes that I have lugged around for a lifetime.  The last couple of fancy meals I made came straight from the internet, so who needs all this paper.  Two piles: stay or go. Okay. Joy of Cooking? Well, that's a classic and I snowed my first serious boyfriend by opening it up--cracking the spine actually--and pretending I knew where to find things. Stay. The New Basics Cookbook by Rosso and Lukins? It was gift from a former boss after he and his wife had dinner at my house. Stay. Okay, all the cookbooks with pictures of French and Italian meals with beautiful countryside backgrounds can stay too. They're books for god sake! I'm a writer! I can't throw books away. But wait, here's something: the full Thanksgiving dinner menu and recipes I tore out of  Gourmet Magazine. I'll never do that again. It took all day and all twelve guests were smashed by the time we ate and in fisticuffs about whether it's immature to smoke pot and Marilyn, the photographer, was busy photographing me basting the bird then secretly sold the photos on some photo service even though I expressly told her not to because I look cross-eyed when I'm high. Someone admired the white tablecloth: where did you find something so long? The bed sheet of the invalid father-in-law whose house we were at. The stoners found it hilarious, the drunks not so much. The old man's accountant came by that night and said "the lights were on when I drove by" then scolded us for wasting the old man's money on a party he was clearly enjoying.  It was his last. Four of the people at that dinner are now dead--five if you count the father-in-law-- the others scattered beyond my reach. Please. Stay.