The Best Grilled Cheese…Ever

I was in a funk on an especially balmy day, the kind when there’s a cool breeze coming off the Harlem River that finds it’s way through the alley by our house and funnels out over the backyard. You’d think it was autumn, not the middle of July. I should be happy, I thought, I’ve got so many wonderful things in my life, so much to look forward to; there are so many possibilities manifesting through intention. It didn’t matter, though. I didn’t know why, but I was feeling curmudgeonly, a bit down because, even though I’m excited about upcoming adventures, I thought: What the heck is there to get excited about in the world anymore?

Nothing new under the sun, as they say. The political spectrum is a big bore with two candidates that are going to duke it out while voters think they actually have a choice in the matter, when in fact, the electoral college decides (or the Illuminati, if you’d like to go there with me). Even matters of the environment and how it’s all going to hell in a hand basket seems to have lost its luster, just like the issue of AIDS did once people started living longer on the drugs. Drugs are boring. Drinking even more so. There’s baseball or football, but then again, it’s all become overblown hero worship and multi-million dollar endorsements for more things that people don’t need all in the guise of “sports”. What about Angelina Jolie’s new twins, or Christian Bale smacking his mum upside the head? Eh. I’ve lost interest in anything on TV since I turned the tube off after 9/11 when I was inundated with the onslaught of doublespeak that Orwell harbingered in 1984. It’s all senseless and depressing, and that’s why…I love a grilled cheese sandwich.

F. and I went to Times Square last week to see a new play at Second Stage Theatre. Summes are high tourist time and I don’t like midtown when it’s packed with people. I feel like I’ve drunk too much beer and discover that my teeth are floating in the back of my neck. The throngs filled the sidewalk so much so that we wanted to simply barrel our way through them, knocking each person down like two bowling balls rolling down 42nd Street. A jaded New Yorker, I know, snubbing my nose at the ooing and ahing clamoring crowds outside Madame Toussaud’s, Mary Poppins, and the Hard Rock Café.

On the way home the 1 train stopped at 215th Street – a delay, a red signal ahead, a stopped train, trouble at the end of the line at the Van Cortlandt stop, cats and dogs sleeping together! Who knows what it was, but after seeing a play filled with drivel, annoying characters, and no plot, I wanted to get home as quickly as possible. But we were stuck and, like many things in New York City, it was out of my control. I tried to let go, I tried to be in the Now, to have Presence that Eckhardt Tolle extols, telling myself, “Right now I am creating anger and annoyance in myself,” asking, “What is my relationship to the present moment?” The answer was a resounding: “Screw that Now baloney!” That was my relationship to the present. I turned to F. and said, “I want out of this *#$%! city.”

I hear the readers’ voices softly murmuring and then building to a mob-like shout for an exegesis of what I wrote earlier: What the heck does a grilled cheese sandwich have to do with all of this?!

Getting excited wasn’t a matter of choice for my mom. Each day was a whole nother opportunity for simple little delights. I say “a whole nother” (do you use this phrase?), because it’s the only way I know how to say what I mean, and what it meant for Mommy to live every day that she did here on Gaia, before she made her triumphant transition into the great unknown.

For Mommy everything was exciting. You might say, “Hey, nutjob, you’re full of tamari roasted salted almonds. Nobody can get excited about everything. That’s a bunch of hooey.” Well…wash me down and slap me upside the collar, hang me on the clothesline, and call me a shirt because I say nothing about my mom was balderdash.

If you ever knew my mom, you’d know what I mean. You’d understand that a grilled cheese and fries at a Mom-and-Pop diner after church was, “Out of this world! The best I’ve ever had!” A month later, the same American contribution to international cuisine at another culinary curio had surpassed the previous cheesy delight and took its place in the pantheon of “out of this world”. By the time my mom died, she had probably consumed two hundred and forty-two “out of this world” grilled cheese deluxe platters. If you like diners, you know what’s so special and exciting about the “deluxe platter”.

For Mommy, the meal was exciting. For her, a trip to the post office to buy stamps turned into an adventure. Buying lunchmeat at the only deli in town was an excuse for more excitement. One might think, Poor thing, if only she’d travel to Europe, see the world, then she’d have a real adventure. I’d thought it myself many times. Sometimes I think we live life in a corner of a room, pacing back and forth, and if we’d only turned around, we’d see a whole nother part of the room we never knew existed. I wanted my mom to get out of her corner, to travel after my dad retired, to experience new foods, new people, new thoughts. But, Mommy had her own way of living, of experiencing new foods, people, thoughts. She wasn’t adverse to change, only change that wasn’t on her terms. Actually, I think change was averse to her.

Sometimes I thought she was close-minded, but the more I reflect on her life, the more I miss her and wish I could talk with her on this dimension, and the more I understand that she was living her own adventure, not mine. I think that’s a valuable lesson: I can only live my life and be there for my friends and loved ones as a sounding board, offering advice and suggestions, but not being frustrated when what I’ve offered isn’t heeded. I used to get so mad at my mom when she refused to do something that could take her out of the corner of her room, like flying with me to Sweden to visit her relatives. She was scared of flying and refused to go. I told her, “You have to go!” She shook her head: the stubborn Swede to the end.

My mom loved everything. The cardinal fluttering down to partake of the daily birdseed my dad scattered outside our kitchen window was sublime. Every year, the orange and yellow leaves on the oak trees in our yard were the most beautiful she’d ever seen. The haircut I’d just had from Joe the Barber was the best I’d ever had, outdoing the last one, and the one before that, until any current haircut had exceeded the original one at four years old a hundred fold.

There was no stopping this woman in her excitement for things that most people would find mundane. She was a laughing Buddha, taking pleasure in experiences and moments that I would most likely take for granted.

Looking back on my life with Mommy, I think the most important thing she unconsciously taught me was an astounding, reverberating joie de vivre. She showed me that joy is at my fingertips, just on the edge of the eyes, on the precipice of the mind, if I can only embrace the mordant hilarity that is always on the cusp of my being. It’s there every day, in every way, and it’s only waiting to be recognized.

That got me thinking even more about the world and if I could have, I would have kicked myself in the a-double-scribble. There’s nothing to get excited about in the world? I’m a fool, utterly, resoundingly foolish. When I really thought about it, I came up with a laundry list of things I’m excited about: flying cars, space travel, the evolution of our consciousness, new kinds of alternative energy, the new Watchmen movie coming out in 2009, et. al.

Can I be like my mom and be excited about every little thing? Maybe, but that’s not always me, and it wasn’t always her. My mom wasn’t happy-go-lucky 24/7. I don’t want to create that impression. She had her moments of sadness, of quiet reflection, her dog days of summer. But, more often than not, those days were filled with sunshine. I’m trying to find that balance, and in order to do that I have to recognize the blues one day and the light on another. They’re both part of life and they must be embraced and not judged as either good or bad – they simply are, and they are a part of me at that moment.

I love this city and I’m excited about the life I create every day. Yes, I want to live in Europe, to travel, to publish my books. I’m working towards that every day, but I’m here now. I’ve come to realize that the blues are a part of learning about myself. Recently, I read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and in it he expressed something that resonated with me. Rather than try to summarize, I’ll simply give a direct quote:

Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where everything comes from and where it is headed? You do know that you are in a period of transition and wish for nothing as much as to transform yourself. If some aspect of your life is not well, then consider the illness to be the means for an organism to free itself from something foreign to it. In that case you must help it to be ill and to have its whole illness, to let it break out. That is the course of its progress.

Rather than look for answers, I want to live the questions, and hopefully, some day, I’ll find that I’ve gradually, over time, found the answers I sought. Maybe there’s lots of shoulds, lots of coulds, lots of woulds, but all I know right now is that when I sit down in the booth of a diner and order my eggs over easy with potatoes and rye toast, I wait and I think of a conversation I once had with my mom about the eggs she ordered.

Mom: “These are the best eggs I’ve ever had.”

Me: “You said that last time. You always say that.”

Mom: “But they’re sooooo good.”

Me: “How can you screw up eggs? You crack ‘em open, fry ‘em up, and slide ‘em on a plate. How can anybody mess up eggs?”

Mom: “Oh, they can. It takes a good cook to make good eggs. And these are the best.”