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COQ AU VIN: A RECIPE, A CONFESSION, A PAEAN

Jun11
by DrGMLaTulippe on 11/06/2018 at 6:55 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

Chicken with wine. That’s it.

Of course, with anything, it’s never really that simple. That’s not “it”, not by a long stretch. Just wine dumped on chicken would be lunatic. But, end of the day: those ingredients, indelibly, make it what it is.

Until this past weekend, I’d never cooked it before. Always wanted to; never got around to it. It sounded delicious, but also overcomplicated, time-consuming and maybe not quite worth the effort? But the past couple days happened and, well…seemed like it’d be more than worth the effort, no matter how it turned out.

Just a couple months ago, WINE SPECTATOR asked Anthony Bourdain how he’d like to be remembered, and he said this: “Maybe that I grew up a little. That I’m a dad, that I’m not a half-bad cook, that I can make a good coq au vin. That would be nice. And not such a bad bastard after all.”

Reading that (and having heard Bourdain discuss his affinity for the dish on more than several occasions), I thought it’d be cool if I could make a good coq au vin myself – as a meal, as a tribute, as a reminder. The other stuff he brought up? I’ll worry about that later. Or never.

The task felt a little daunting, but his introduction to his coq au vin recipe in his LES HALLES COOKBOOK made me feel a bit better:

“Another easy dish that looks like it’s hard. It’s not. In fact, this is the kind of dish you might enjoy spending a leisurely afternoon with. There are plenty of opportunities for breaks. It’s durable, delicious, and the perfect illustration of the principles of turning something big and tough and unlovely into something truly wonderful. I know it looks like a lot of ingredients, and that the recipe might be complicated. Just take your time. Knock out your prep one thing at a time, slowly building your mise en place. Listen to some music while you do it. There’s an open bottle of wine left from the recipe, so have a glass now and again. Just clean up after yourself as you go, so your kitchen doesn’t look like a disaster area when you start the actual cooking.

You should, with any luck, reach a Zen-like state of pleasurable calm. And like the very best dishes, coq au vin is one of those that goes on the stove looking, smelling, and tasting pretty nasty, and yet later, through the mysterious, alchemical processes of time and heat, turns into something magical.”

Alright then. What else is there but to get started? I decided to use Bourdain’s recipe directly, while adding and subtracting a few things here and there to fit what I like (And what I could find). Can’t really make it mine if I’m slavish to the “rules”, right? That’s what I’ll tell myself.

Ingredients needed:

1 bottle of red wine

1 carrot, cut into 1/4-inch pieces

1 onion, cut into 1-inch dice

1 celery rib, cut into 1/2-inch slices

4 whole cloves

2-3 tablespoons of white peppercorns

1 bouquet garni

6 cloves of garlic, smashed

1 whole ~5lb chicken

Chicken stock

Salt and pepper

Olive oil

6 tablespoons of butter (as always, I prefer Kerrygold, and you should too)

Flour

1/4 pound of slab bacon, cut into lardons

1/2 pound of white button mushrooms, the stems removed

3 shallots, sliced

8 green onion bulbs

GETTING STARTED: DAY ONE

Yep, this is a two-day affair, but don’t sweat it – Day One is pretty easy.

To start, do nothing. That’s right –  you can leave the chicken whole for this step, which is neat, because if you haven’t quartered a chicken in, oh, ten or fifteen years, that’s sort of a pain in the ass, and you get to put it off until tomorrow.

So to actually begin, put together your bouquet garni. There’s no real accepted definition of what that is, so to speak, so it basically comes down to combining herbs that you like and/or flavors you want to impart on the dish. This being chicken, I chose a bunch of thyme, a couple large sprigs of rosemary, a bunch of sage, two bay leaves and a hunk of parsley.

Throw that in a huge bowl along with your carrot, onion, celery, peppercorns and cloves. Then lay the whole chicken on top of it. Open your red wine, measure out a cup of it, and set it aside. Pour the rest into the bowl over the chicken and stuff; then, pour the cup you measured out back into the wine bottle and stuff the cork back in. What you’ve poured into the bowl is probably not going to be near enough to submerge the whole chicken; don’t worry about it. You can use more red wine if you want to finish this step, but I like to use chicken stock here to give a little more depth to the marinade. Pour enough stock in that the chicken is about half-submerged. Then cover the bowl with plastic cling wrap and stick it in the refrigerator overnight.

(A NOTE: At some point, roughly halfway through, you’re going want to flip the chicken over in the solution. Oh, that’s the middle of the night for you? Tough shit. You should have planned better. I didn’t force you to make this, you know.)

That’s it. You’re done with Day One. You made it. Celebrate yourself.

***

The first person I ever remember cooking was my grandmother. And oh, man, could Granny cook.

When I was younger, it was all done for family gatherings – birthdays, holidays and the like. And I marveled at how many things she had going at once. Main dishes, side dishes, sauces. Cookies, cakes, pies. The woman had four fucking burners and one oven. How in the hell she managed to get so much done in an area of about eight square feet will remain a perpetual curiosity to me. It was really something to behold. And never ONCE did it seem too much for her. She had it all under control. She wouldn’t even let anyone help.

But the WHOLE KITCHEN was her base, her zone. You should have seen the way her refrigerator was arranged. Calling it “meticulous” would be a laughable understatement, and also halfway incorrect. That word assumes a careful order. And there was nothing “careful” about the order of Granny’s refrigerator – it was, at best, a tightly controlled, gleefully overstuffed and endlessly chaotic secret government project, like wherever they hid the Ark after Indians Jones rescued it. If you stood just a few feet back, it looked like the world’s smallest and most indecipherably regulated favela.

Because even in the nonsense of it all, SHE knew where everything was and where everything went, and that was all that mattered. And it mattered. Oh, it mattered. In fact: the only time I ever remember my grandmother getting mad at me – seriously, in my whole life – is when I got out a container. of her homemade applesauce (I can’t even get into the wondrousness of that stuff at the moment, but oh my God) and managed to not put it back in the exact same place. Twenty minutes later, a calamity arose. “GEOFFREY? GEOFFREY? THAT’S NOT WHERE THE APPLESAUCE GOES, AND YOU KNOW THAT.”

You may be entertained to learn that her career was serving children. As a public school lunch lady.

One of the things I think about most now is how she kept every recipe on a single, 3×5 notecard. Stained, creased and yellowed from years of battle, she’d take a moment to reread each before jumping into a new (old) concoction. I’ve come to believe over the years that she did this not because she was relearning how to cook each one, but to remember cooking them previously, and how much we all talked and laughed together as it cooked and how feverishly we all enjoyed stuffing our faces with the result. I’ve come to believe this because I find myself doing the same thing with my own recipes.

In later years, I remember her making my brother Kyle and my cousin Justin and me Steak-Umms. If you’re unfamiliar with Steak-Umms, they’re mircothin frozen slabs of low-grade ribeye that you drop in a hot pan and fry up to what can be charitably be described as a vaguely beeflike product. Hobbled by diabetes and gout that quite literally destroyed her feet, she’d limp her way out to the kitchen every afternoon, fry up a couple dozen little sheets of trashmeat, slap them between a plain white roll and call it lunch. Not because we asked her to, but because she wanted to. She’d never once seen cooking as a chore or a duty. She saw it as the best of what she had to give to others. Because there are only so many ways to tell someone, in words, that you care about them. And those Steak-Umm sandwiches were fucking. Delicious.

When I went off to college and had my own place, I made Steak-Umms once. I was passing down the frozen aisle of the Food Lion and spotted them by accident. “Holy shit,” I thought. “I LOVE Steak-Umms.” I grabbed some rolls, went home, threw half a dozen meatsheets in a hot pan, and made myself a sandwich. It was absolutely repugnant. Greasy, flavorless, stupid. And that was when I realized something and learned the single most important thing about cooking food:

The Steak-Umms weren’t delicious because they were any good. They were delicious because Granny loved us.

***

NOW THE WORK STARTS: DAY TWO

Hey, that chicken isn’t going to braise itself! Retrieve it from the refrigerator, pull it out of the marinade – and hang onto that stuff, it’s the most valuable part of the whole process – and pat it as dry as you can without tearing the skin off. Don’t worry if it has purple spots on it. It’s supposed to. I know it looks weird.

Bourdain’s recipe calls for you to sear off the bird whole and braise it in the same form, but I decided against that. I wanted each piece to develop flavors on two sides. In my opinion, you should at LEAST split the bird in half. But really, you want to quarter it. That’s a bit of a misnomer – as you can see, you end up with at least six pieces of chicken (two breasts, two whole legs, two wings), and you’ll end up with eight if you separate the thighs on their own. But still: I’d do it. There are some great tutorials on YouTube, which I admittedly had to refer to, since it had been at least ten years since I’d done this.

Once your chicken is prepared, salt and pepper it all over. Then, strain the marinade; keep the wine/stock solution in one bowl and put all the solids in another. You’ll still need everything in both.

Now it’s time to decide what you’re going to use to cook this damn thing. At the VERY least you need a deep pan that you can fit everything into. A large, high-rimmed skillet will work, but a Dutch oven is best. As you can see, that’s what I used; yours doesn’t have to be cast iron, but I like that best for these types of jobs. Put it on your stove on high heat, pour in some olive oil and two tablespoons (a “big glob”, if you want to be technical) of butter, and let it sit there until it *just* begins smoking. Then lay your chicken parts in, skin side-down first. If you got a large bird and need two shifts to get all the pieces seared, that’s fine. Couple minutes on each side should do it. Set the chicken aside on its own plate.

Next, dump in the onion, carrot and celery from the marinade. Throw in the garlic. Turn the heat down to medium and let that sauté for about ten minutes and soften up. Use a metal spatula to scrape up all the chicken fond off the bottom. When the onions are golden brown, take a hefty spoonful of flour and coat the vegetables with it. Stir it in good to make sure everything gets an even distribution. You’ll watch as most, if not all, of the pan liquid is absorbed. Throw your chicken back in on top. Drop the bouquet garni in. Then, grab your marinating liquid and pour it over the contents until your chicken pieces are about half-submerged again; make sure the bouquet is fully-submerged. Bring that to a boil, and then reduce to low heat so it simmers. Give it about an hour and a half.

The trickiest part of this whole deal is next.

***

“Leave me in peace,

I’m all alone with my angel.
She died in a dream
So I could live my life,
But all the lies

That they have told me
They make me wanna shiver.
When I’m lost and I’m lonely
That’s not gonna ease

My troubled mind.” – Noel Gallagher, “Fallen Angel (AKA…Broken Arrow)”

I’ve been rolling these lyrics over in my head constantly over the past few days. This year has been unbelievably hard for me personally, but I’m not in pain. Which makes me one of the lucky ones. If you *are* in pain, I’m thinking about you. And I hope it gets better.

***

IT’S ABOUT TO GET SAUCY (GOD, I’M SO SORRY): DAY TWO

Bourdain splits the sauce part of this recipe into two pans – a small sauté pan and a small saucepan. But one of the things I learned from him was also the joy of “one pot, one dish” cooking, so I combined the process into the same medium-sized saucepan, and I’m really glad I did.

Heat your naked saucepan to medium-high and throw the lardons in; if you got them plain, hit them with some pepper. They don’t need oil or butter – they’ll cook in their own fat. After ten minutes or so, they’ll be crispy, and there will be plenty of nature’s grease left over. Lay down some paper towels on a plate, extract the lardons with a slotted spoon so the fat *stays* in the pan, and let them drain on the paper towel.

Now, throw in your mushroom caps. Depending on the amount of fat in the pan and the amount of water in the mushrooms, one of two things will happen: the mushrooms will turn nice and golden brown, or they’ll release enough water mixed with the fat that they braise in that mixture instead. Either way, you’ve won. When they’re done cooking, put them with the lardons (though keep them separated on the plate), drain any liquid left in the pan and toss in your shallots and green onion bulbs.

Incidentally, this recipe calls for pearl onions, and I went to three different stores to find them, even willing to settle for the canned ones. No dice. The guy at Trader Joes finally told me they’re seasonal. Who knew, but fuck me, right? Anyway, I decided the shallot/green onion bulb combination was a good compromise.

Let them sweat in the saucepan for a few minutes. Add a bit of salt and pepper. When they’re starting to either brown or become translucent, add either the mushroom/lardon fat liquid back in or just enough water to BARELY cover the onions, along with another two tablespoons of butter. Bring it to a boil, then reduce to low heat and let it cook for a while. You want about half the liquid to evaporate. Once it does, remove the onions (you can put them with the mushrooms) add that leftover cup of red wine from yesterday to it. This next part is optional: I like a thicker pan sauce, so I added a big tablespoon of flour and whisked it in aggressively. If you like your sauce thinner, don’t bother. Either way, let this reduce until the chicken is done cooking.

I forgot to take a picture of this one. Sorry. Use your obviously unlimited imagination to conjure what the photograph of a soupy, brownish-pink melange might look like in this very space.

Almost there, kind of.

***

The person who *taught* me the most about cooking was my dad. This was largely accidental.

That’s not to say Dad didn’t want me to learn, or was somehow not interested in teaching me. Neither could be further from the truth. It’s more happily accidental in that I don’t think he ever set out to teach me, and I never purposely set out to learn. It just ended up happening organically.

My dad was a traveling salesman when I was younger, so he didn’t cook at home often, and honestly I don’t remember meals he made growing up. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I started paying attention, and for no other reason than we weren’t getting along.

I’m not sure I was ever the “angry” kid, but I’ve never not been stubborn and reactionary and convinced I’m right about everything, and that’s not a great personality when you’re immature and your father is also…stubborn and reactionary and convinced he’s always right about everything. But the world seemed to quiet down for Dad when he cooked. He’d be the first to admit he is in no way, shape or form the most artistic guy alive, but he’s very creative and blessed of an adventurous spirit, and as such, he always seemed to enjoy the *act* of cooking more than whatever resulted from it. And I enjoyed watching him do it. But even more than that, I enjoyed that we got along while he did.

I spent a lot of time around a cooking range with my father, and while there were always recipes, they were hardly the most important facet of making a meal. In fact, they were almost annoying to Dad. Boring. Insulting. He was far less interested in what the recipe said than he was delighted in what the recipe could *become*. Peppers got stuffed with odd cheeses and bits of wayward leftovers. Hamburgers became “garbageburgers”; molded in to patties, yes, but strewn with…you know, kind of whatever the hell was laying around the kitchen that day.

On occasion, these dishes were a disaster, and you’d choke down something truly awful, and later you’d laugh about it. But that was very rare. Dad’s blessed with just sort of preternaturally knowing what works and what doesn’t, a talent honed in large part, you may be entertained to learn, by cooking with his grandmother when he was young. And that led to mostly odd dinners of questionable ingredients that ended up being completely amazing, somehow.

And there would be Dad, eating along with us, complaining about how the meat was overcooked or the vegetables undersalted, generally never really being satisfied. But how many dishes are ever perfect? We always got a kick out of him sulking. It wasn’t until I became a writer that I realized he wasn’t sulking as much as wondering what he did “wrong” and how he was going to make it better the next time. Closer to “right”.

This isn’t going to be an essay about “cooking is storytelling”, even though it so often is. I’m just saying: you realize a lot of things the older you get, and you’re always learning, even if you think you’re on autopilot, and one of the most fun things about cooking is experimenting and taking chances by ignoring old ideas or building on old ideas until they’re new ideas. And it hasn’t escaped my grasp that this is true in screenwriting as well.

One other thing Granny taught me that Dad reinforced over and over and over: you can bring happiness to people through cooking. Dad has spent countless weekends over the last 25 years cooking for others, and often on a large, charitable scale. He basically has his own parking spot at the local Ronald McDonald House, where he’s spent an untold number of breakfasts feeding tired, broken, reeling families of sick and dying children a stack of pancakes or a Scotch egg, and treating them to just a fraction of a morning where they feel as though they can afford to relax, and maybe even smile a little bit.

It can be surprisingly easy to forget that food is almost always best when it’s shared, one way or another.

***

I MEAN, THIS IS BASICALLY THE END: DAY TWO

Again, after ninety minutes or so, your chicken should be brilliantly braised. Go ahead and turn off the heat on your pan/Dutch oven, and use tongs to transfer the chicken to a serving dish.

OK: the lardons, the mushrooms, and the onions? Add them back into the pan with your wine sauce, which should have reduced and thickened now; if you added flour, it’ll be closer to the consistency of gravy. Stir them in. Now, grab a strainer and place it over the sauce. Pick up your Dutch oven and pour some of the braising liquid into the wine sauce. You definitely want to comfortably cover all the stuff in it. If you use a little too much, you can offset it with a touch more flour, but don’t worry about it. When the bacon/mushrooms/onions are just drowned, you’re good. Stir this all together and let it simmer down again for about five minutes.

Then, pour it over the chicken like a delicious dark waterfall. Throw some of the carrots on celery on there if you like. And maybe add some chopped green onion for color and flavor.

You can eat it just like that, or you can serve it over something. Mashed potatoes might be a great way to go? I went with buttered egg noodles, which I mixed the excess sauce in with. That was good. I liked that.

Did I mentioned you just made coq au vin? Congrats, because you did. I’d eat it now. It’s probably really good. It’s at least better than you thought it was going to be, I bet.

***

I never knew Anthony Bourdain, but I was enthralled by him. He was everything I’m not: hard-living, risk-taking, jetsetting, ruggedly handsome, deeply interested in understanding other people, grown up and effortlessly fucking cool. His death hit me like none other (that wasn’t family or a loved one) that I can remember.

The night David Bowie died, some genius on Twitter made a brilliant point about why we’re so sad when a celebrity dies, and I wish I could remember who it was so I could credit them here. But in a nutshell, the notion was this: maybe it’s not that you thought you knew them; maybe it’s that what they gave to the world helped you better know yourself. That struck me immediately and profoundly as true, and no probably no one represented that for me as completely as Anthony Bourdain.

It wasn’t that he was the best chef in the world; he wasn’t. It wasn’t that he was the best writer in the world; he wasn’t. It’s not that he was the only guy to ever kick heroin and still manage go to around the world boozing and eating and smiling. It was that he was always looking for the next *thrill* in life. And often, he found that in the bottom of a bowl or in the rim of a glass, or the end of a good book or a movie, and almost always around other people. And he had this amazing knack for not only finding the unfamiliar in the familiar, but much more importantly, for finding the familiar in the unfamiliar.

I am afraid of flying. I hate it. It’s the main reason I’ve never left this continent. But if I ever do, it’ll be because Anthony Bourdain convinced me it was not only reasonable to do so, but the duty of those who have the time, the money and the opportunity. That you should give a middle finger to the idea that Where You Live is Where It All Is. And I liked that he made me feel it was OK to love a four-dollar In N Out burger just as much as a $600 multi-course sit-down at Masa. And that food itself is almost never perfect, but depending on the ingredients and the company and the atmosphere, the experience of eating often can be.

Cooking – even at the basic, simple, contained level at which I do it – has become one of the great joys of my life. I love going shopping for ingredients, hemming and hawing about which chives look the greenest or which beer to use for basting. I love the transformational process of it all, lording over a bubbling stew or a quality piece of caramelizing meat. I love that I can take all these disparate elements, wild and unrelated, and turn them into something whole, something that makes sense, if only because it tastes good. And while I am happy cooking for myself, and do it often nowadays, it’s never as gratifying or meaningful as when I share the planning, the process and/or the end result of it with someone else.

I sort of developed a bug for cooking in college, which is something my roommates would probably be shocked to know, because they rarely, if ever, saw me do it. It got sparked when one of our friends in culinary school came to visit and cheffed up the weekend for us. It was cheap and easy and unreal. So I started reading, and I started learning. I rewatched old GREAT CHEFS OF THE WORLD Episodes I’d recorded onto VHS countless afternoons after coming home from high school. I read cookbooks and squirrelled them away. I bought the smallest possible quantities of food and experimented with “dishes” when I was alone. Some were very, very, very bad. Part of learning. But some were quite good, too.

And yet I hid it all away from others, and eventually just stopped any meaningful food-related pursuits entirely. Until a few days ago, I never really stopped to wonder why. But now I think it had a lot to do with insecurity, and having come from and learned under such wonderful cooks before me, and worrying that what I made wouldn’t stack up. That I’d somehow not make others as happy as I had been. And there’s no real reason to labor in a vacuum, is there?

Then, about ten years ago, I was living alone and watching a rerun of NO RESERVATIONS. In this particular Episode, Bourdain made a cassoulet – a duck, sausage and bean casserole that’s long been a staple of French peasant cooking. He shared it with a friend’s family. And for whatever reason, that spark came back. I thought to myself, “That looks complicated as hell. I bet I can make that.” It was. I did. And it was amazing, despite the fact that I really didn’t know what I was doing. I just followed along, constantly noting what I might to different the next time, looking for advice when something stumped me. I’ve probably made it on a half-dozen occasions since. Always for others. Better each time.

It’d be impossible to say what a gift it’s been, being given the opportunity to cook for people I love and make them happy, just as my father and grandmother and others did for me along the way. And I never met Anthony Bourdain. We weren’t friends, and there’s a zero percent chance he was ever aware I existed. But he blessed me with this uncommonly good reason to cook, and I know I’m far from the only one to have been so blessed by something he did or just who he was, and I am very, very sad that I live in a world where knowing he had that impact on others, as he certainly must have, wasn’t enough to keep him amongst us.

Part of this…whatever this is, yes, I’m using it to say goodbye to him. But in a way I hope he would have appreciated, it’s also how I’m hoping to tell so many of you that I love you, and I care about you, and I’m glad every day that I get to walk this often-darling little planet with you.

***

This coq au vin was shared with my brother, who agreed it was pretty darned good. My niece is eight and has the palate of a sleeping donkey, so she passed. Me? I honestly thought I could have used a little more salt earlier in the process. Probably should have started with a different variety of wine. REALLY could have quartered the chicken better.

So, basically: it was perfect.

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A SEMIAUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT OF THE HOLIDAYS

Dec06
by DrGMLaTulippe on 06/12/2017 at 6:01 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

There’s a four-inch thick blanket of hospital-white snow on the ground, and I wonder if its puffy construction is absorbing all the sound. It’s so, so quiet out here. There’s no smell, either. The air is inert. Can snow absorb scent? I file these queries away for later, when I’m in a place where accessing Google is possible.

I am standing in the middle of nowhere – Nebraska, to be general. To be specific: I’ve stopped my rental car on the outskirts of Bennington at the edge of what I assume is a farm; I assume this because I’m leaning up against a rustic, handmade fence that surrounds an impressive property, and I can see a barn in the distance of that property. That barn mostly obscures a cozy two-story home, which I’d have missed completely if not for the chimney belching out delightfully bucolic smoke. I imagine the quaint brick fireplace in the farmhouse’s living room, because…what farmhouse doesn’t have a brick fireplace in the living room? What would be the point of THAT omission?

I push back from the fence, which looks to have been constructed sometime during the Civil War. It stretches all fence-like for as far as my eyes can see. Half a mile, maybe? That’s a lazy guess. It’s dusk and my eyelids are freezing, so honestly, I can’t see much. And it occurs to me in this moment that there was no Civil War in Nebraska, because there was no Nebraska during the Civil War. Not in any meaningfully incorporated form. Nothing official.

The rest of the landscape is so flat that train tracks, distant in the other direction entirely, seem an oddly prominent geological feature.
I take a step sideways and feel the snow pack beneath the boots I specifically for this trip. You can tell a lot about snow by the way it transforms when underfoot. Is it that instant powdery descent into tundra, like stepping on a pillow that’s fallen to the floor? Or is it that resistant, satisfyingly damp crunch that renders tightly-packed flakes into an icy mold? This is that satisfying crunch, and all of a sudden this stop was worth it, even if my eyes frost over. At least my feet are toasty – the socks I bought with the boots are not messing around. You forget how vital socks are when you wear sandals for ten months of the year.

Thinking about sandals makes me realize, for some baffling reason, that I’ve not only left the car running but that I closed the door when I got out. I have literally no idea how this Brobdingnagian SUV that Enterprise gave me – under the guise of a “free upgrade” – works. Not in the details. And it dawns on me that this story could end with me dying out here in the cold, hilariously, all because I was eager to stop my gigantic, artificially-warmed monstercar to look at a farm in the fading daylight.

And what the hell am I doing in Nebraska, anyway?

Knowing the keys won’t be there, I reach into the pocket of the only winter jacket I own to find my hand proceeding through, appropriately, a fist-sized hole contained within its lining. I’m down a compartment. That’s OK. I’m wearing gloves, and gloves are like pockets, but for your hands only. That profound notion dialed into existence, I take one last look around – like the main character would at the end of any good movie – and head back for the SUV. I’m relieved to find the door unlocked and my life not, in fact, headed for a popsicle’s end.
It’s the 19th of December, 2009. I am thirty years old. And I have decided to spend the Holidays in the Midwest.
It was an impulsive decision. My Xmases weren’t always this…esoteric.

———————————————-

In fact – and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately – the Xmases of my childhood were, for the most part, idyllic. Like if SATURDAY EVENING POST covers were set in the 80s and 90s.

A caveat: when I say “Xmases of my childhood”, I’m really only speaking about less than half of the Xmases I remember. Obviously, unless you’re some kind of complicatedly weird overachiever, no one remembers their first few Xmases at all. So those are out of the conversation immediately. But also: we moved around a lot when I was a kid, so my immediate family (which started with just Me, Mom and Dad and over the years sprouted to include my three brothers) spent a majority of our Xmases away from my extended family in Pennsylvania.

I remember very, very little of any of these remote Holidays.

They weren’t bad times; not by any stretch of the imagination. I can grasp onto snippets of all of them except Pittsburgh. Denver, Colorado Springs, Kansas – they’re all there, but only ephemerally. Snapshots at best – certain gifts, certain dinners (one year we went out and I got horribly, rapidly sick and I puked at the table in a fancy restaurant). Hazy POV footage, banked in the temporal lobe, of waking up at 5AM and stumbling out to the tree lights softly illuminating a pile of wrapped packages. That I can’t remember more fills me with an almost comical amount of guilt. It’s not that I don’t want to, and it’s not that Mom and Dad didn’t knock every Xmas out of the park – they did. I might not have total recall, but I know that for sure. And when I think of those times, I smile. That’s kind of all that matters, I suppose. But sometimes I wonder if I’ve filled in the gaps with things I’m only wishing had occurred.

Also, that’s a bit of a cheat. I do remember something very specifically from those Xmases: the stockings my grandmother would send us in the mail. She had this tradition – which my family has kept alive to this day – of buying a dozen pairs of L’Eggs, cutting them in half, and filling them with treasures until they damn near burst. So, yeah, she took the whole “Xmas stocking” thing and pushed it to a defiantly literal conclusion. To this day it’s the most wonderfully charming act of simple Xmas spirit I’ve experienced.

Here’s the thing, though, and this is perhaps the main reason I remember the stockings so vividly: my grandfather smoked, at his most virile, eight cigars a day. Every day. And not good cigars – El Productos. Cheap, machine-made atrocities that basically consisted of the most adamantly rejected tobacco scraps, strips of forty year-old newspaper and a triple-dog dare. The second-hand smoke from those misfires alone could coat your lungs with tar in half an hour. My grandparents’ home was CONSUMED by it. It permeated everything.

So by the time those stockings got to us halfway across the country, everything in them reeked like the infected asshole of a necrotic wildebeest wallowing in mosquito mud. At the foot of every stocking? An apple and an orange. Eating them was right out of the question unless you wanted a mouthful of desiccated Skoal pulp. The candy bars didn’t fare much better. But the real show was the Sour Patch Kids, which my grandmother – who clearly must have hated us – would liberate from their sealed product bags and dump into unsealed sandwich bags. Of course, the cigars infected them too, and the gummies REALLY soaked that brown cloud in, and my brothers and I used to dare each other to see who could eat the most without crying. It was Gitmo-level torture. We used to laugh so hard watching each other struggle in common misery.

It was awful. Wonderfully, life-affirmingly awful. Because it tasted like home.

———————————————-

You would walk into my grandparents’ house on Xmas Day and be immediately hit by the most wonderful cooking smells. This alone was a testament to what a culinary genius my grandmother was: she roasted and baked so hard that the smells of turkey and rosemary and chocolate outdueled the cigar smoke. Which should have been impossible.

That was the first impact. The second was the sound of laughter.

They lived in a simple little Cape Cod that sat on a hill, and even its earliest days, my family ran about twenty strong. Not a single one of them – aunts, uncles, cousins – is capable of not being funny, and, to a person, they can spin a yarn. A typical gathering is replete with a series of stories, chaotic cackling, a slapping of knees, and then someone immediately attempting to top the previous tale.

You know how you talk about joy, and it’s usually an abstract concept that you reach for, but never catch, never really experience? Not for me.

But there was also pure, unabashed terror. Because all the presents – hundreds, THOUSANDS of them, it seemed – were locked away in the basement. My bastard grandfather, who was SUCH a bastard, wouldn’t let a soul into that basement until after we ate dinner. Imagine what that does to the psyche of a child who’s 8, 9, 10 years old. Your grandmother makes the most incredible food known to man, and you’re too sick with anticipation to eat it. All that matters. Is the stuff in the basement. Trapped underneath the wrapping paper. Imprisoned behind a door.

So we’d push the food around our plates at the Kids’ Dinner Table, shooting looks of white-hot malice at the Adults’ Dinner Table, where everyone was simply content to stuff their faces and gab. For what amounted to probably less than half an hour, these “relatives” were more hated than diabetes, our family’s greatest scourge. I’m confident that it’s a miracle no one was killed by a ravenously materialistic preteen.
Speaking of homicide: finally, dinner would end, mercifully, and every child in the family sought to murder every other child in the family in pursuit of getting through that basement door and down the stairs to the Goodie Room first. But: one needed contend with the slipperiest, most overly-polished wooden staircase known to man. Tread uncarefully and you risked a parabolic upending and a dreadfully-cracked noggin. I’m confident it was yet another miracle that no one was killed in pursuit of their own materialistic preteen desires.
But once you safely hit that basement carpet…it was magic.

Another smell managed to overwhelm the senses: that acrid, metallic tang of an electric train set, which my grandfather always set up to circle the base of a tree overloaded with lights and ornaments. The compulsion to rush over and try to touch it (or, God forbid, pick it up as it moved) was so strong that my grandfather ended up building a small fence to encircle the track and forebade any of us from getting within five feet of it. He was a larger man, and he doled out the presents, so this was one rule we were keen to obey.

And oh, the presents – so many at once! You didn’t even care that they weren’t all for you. It’s just that they were there, and goddamnit, they were going to GET OPENED. What else mattered? Lord Almighty, just get to it.

The Giving of the Gifts went thusly: everyone gathered around, taking a seat. The Adults sat on the furniture. The kids sat on the floor; if you were quick, you grabbed a pillow. If you weren’t, you learned to love that shallow carpet. My grandfather selected a gift, you pissed your pants hoping it was for you, and it usually wasn’t, but it was announced for SOMEONE, and it was either from another family member or from Santa, and he handed it to the anointed like it was the last loaf of bread in wartime, and then everyone held their breath while that person opened that gift, and then they unwrapped it and showed it to the group, and everyone yelled, “HEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY,” and clapped like monkeys as though your He-Man action figure was crafted in Heaven. It was, in two words, the greatest. In between gifts, the room filled with the warm noises of joke-cracking and idle, penetrating gossip.

Memory is a funny thing. I can see this scene so clearly that it almost hurts, but it’s now a singular diorama – all those Xmases have long since run together into a one velvety Rockwellian portrait. I see the faces of the people I love dearly. I smell burning metal of the train. I hear my uncles chortling and taste sugared walnuts, which I always ate a few of, even though I didn’t really like them. I can even feel my grandfather hugging me, the soft flannel of his shirt brushing against my cheek. But, while I always sat at the front of the room, as close to all those material items as I could get… when I see it now, I’m standing far in the back. Watching, but apart from it all. No longer “there”, no matter how hard I reach.

I’d love to tell you this is a memory that will perpetuate, but I can’t. For the time being, it’s still strong. Still vital. But I lose bits and pieces of it every year, almost as if my grandfather’s cheap cigar smoke is filtering in more and more, increasingly robbing me of a clear look at this beautiful projection that I worry will soon be slipping right through my fingers.

One thing I will never forget: right before my family left, every year, I’d make a quick dash to the old stone fireplace in the living room. At the base of the hearth, right smack in the middle, was a perfect keystone. My grandfather went to great lengths to obtain it and set it there, the story goes, to honor Pennsylvania, the only place he and my grandmother had ever called home. They were both born there. They’d both die there years later. I always made a point to lay my hand the keystone myself. Just so I could say that I was home too, even if only temporarily.
I left that house every year – whether I lived nearby or not – with a heavy heart, knowing there would be a whole year before we could do it all again. We’d step outside into the cold, and my mom tells me that I used to always comment that I wished there was snow. It just never seemed to show up on the 25th of December.

She also tells me that I always complained about how hungry I was. Ah, youth.

This genuinely surprised me, but: trying to recall even one gift I received there in all those years, I came up totally blank.

———————————————-

I’ve lived in Los Angeles now for almost fourteen years, and save for a few jaunts back East, I spend most of my Xmases here now. Sometimes with family, almost always with friends. There are no keystones lying about – no fireplaces either, really – but somehow it manages to feel like home now.

It was in the low-50s last night when I walked my dogs, so it was chilly enough already in my t-shirt, shorts. And then a cold breeze kicked through, and my toes bristled, and I smiled to myself. This is about as December as it gets in Southern California. Not much, but worth it.
I kept the dogs moving, and at one point, I looked down at my feet, clad in those aforementioned sandals. Suddenly it got much nippier, and everything went quiet. With each step I took, the crunch of snow underneath new boots got louder and louder inside my head, and I instinctively jammed my hand in my pocket. My keys were there.

I stopped, and my dogs looked up at me quizzically. I kept seeing flashes of things in my head,. I closed my eyes, trying to focus, struggling to wrap my mind around something elusive. I felt my memory – it’s a funny thing – scratching at the base of my skull. I held on, and suddenly, I was back, standing at the edge of that farm, in the cold, with the daylight creeping away and my rental gently humming nearby. I blinked, soaking in my surroundings, and remembered how I felt just then – very aware that I was very far away from everything. But especially far away from home.

A question floated right in front of me, but before I could ask it, the scene disappeared in an abrupt crash to black, and I opened my eyes. My dogs were sitting there on the sidewalk, annoyed. The breeze had died down and my skin was warm. Collecting myself, I started walking, and the dogs followed, and I looked down at my sandals, and all I heard was their flat flopping on the concrete. And then it dawned on me, and I started laughing to myself. It wasn’t particularly amusing revelation, nor was it much of a revelation at all, and I’m not sure that it matters anyway. But it was true.

I’ve read about it, I’ve seen it in pictures, I’ve flown over it, and I’ve even lived just a state away.

But I’ve never actually *been* to Nebraska.

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THE LADY IN YELLOW, SHE WALKS

Nov19
by DrGMLaTulippe on 19/11/2017 at 9:45 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

The Lady in Yellow walks away from her past.

She wouldn’t tell you it’s been a bad life – certainly not. She’d tell you the good memories outnumber the bad, that there were more laughs than tears. That, in aggregate, there was more that made her happy than made her sad. She experienced loss and tragedy and anxiety and the occasional horror and still came out ahead. She’d tell you that’s been a life worth living.

She would also probably tell you, however – if pressed – that her life very often felt like it was not her own. That she ceded command of it to others years ago, in another time, in some other place. That is her nature – to put others before herself. That became her purpose.

Now she walks to change that purpose. Now she walks to take her life back.

She walks to take it back from those who didn’t believe in her. From those who judged her because she wasn’t educated enough or wasn’t interested in committing to career paths that didn’t engage her. From those who laughed at her hopes, her dreams, her starts that eventually, inevitably turned into stops. From those who never thought she was enough.

Too often, she herself was one of them.

Now she walks to prove to herself that she is indeed enough – and always has been. Now she walks because she no longer hears those who dismissed her.

She stumbled through two marriages and raising four children. She would tell you that she did the best she could, and in the same breath she’d admit that sometimes her best wasn’t good enough. People get tired; single parents get hollowed out. They don’t have the luxury of choice. They have responsibility for lives that are not their own, and far too often, that’s all there is time for.

Now she walks because she chooses to. Now she walks because this time is her time. Time she earned that will never – can never – be repaid in full. But time that will be spent in her control.

Nearly fifteen years ago that time was nearly ripped away from her before she even got the chance to arrive at it. Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma took the wheel. There were tumors and operations. There was radiation and chemotherapy. There was hair loss and weakness.

There was never an ounce of surrender. She was not about to allow some disease deprive her of the chance to live the life she always deserved to. She took the wheel right back.

Now she walks for those who can’t. For those who are still fighting. For those who did not make it.

She never did quite learn how to put herself before others. Not altogether.

Last year, she began walking. Not as we all do, in the typical ambulatory act of getting from one place to another, but as an act of courage. As a way to push herself forward. As a way to show herself that she didn’t have to accept the life she’d merely been granted. As a way to propel herself into the life she always deserved to be living.

She walked. And she walked. And she walked. She never ran. This wasn’t a race. This was a meditation. This was a resolution.

This was a promise.

This Saturday, the Lady in Yellow crossed a finish line exactly 13.1 miles from the starting line she stood behind nearly four hours prior. There were friends there, and family too. They cheered her on. She acknowledged them. She waved. But she stepped through the red, white and blue gates for one person and one person only: herself. Finally.

Her favorite color is yellow. If you asked her why, she’d tell you it’s because yellow is the brightest. The one that seems to shine.

She may or may not know that it mirrors her spirit. A spirit that, even when dimmed to its lowest wattage, was always the one that still somehow shone the brightest.

Now she walks for that spirit. Now she walks towards a future that, above all else, is just for her.

I am so very proud of you, Mom.

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HOW ONE OF THE VERY BEST MOVIES OF 2017 BROKE ME AND THEN PUT ME BACK TOGETHER

Sep22
by DrGMLaTulippe on 22/09/2017 at 4:54 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

Let me get this out of the way up front: yes, this is a story about a movie. Not just one, even though it is just about one, really, but also all of them, theoretically. That said, I’m barely going to talk about the movie itself concretely. In fact, I’m going to – as per normal – talk mostly about me. Why? Because I’m good at it, and I’m a solipsist, and because I have to in order to get my point across. And it’s going to take a WHILE. So…bear with me. Or don’t! Giving you a chance to cut and run now. This is gonna go about 3700 words. I’m not fucking around.

Still here? OK, neat!

I was damn excited to see THE BIG SICK. Kumail Nanjiani? Yes. Holly Hunter? YES. Ray Romano???? At some point, I’m going to have to do a whole thing about how Ray Romano’s evolution into one of my favorite actors is a wicked twist of Shyamalanic proportions. Anyway: rave reviews from friends, this ridiculous cast (including, obviously, Zoe Kazan, who I was pathetically less familiar with before the movie), and the promise of a pretty dark comedy that I had a very, very personal connection to? It’s like they made a movie just for Geoff!

And boy, did they. Just not in the way that I was expecting. At all. Like…one day, I’m going to find THE BIG SICK probably the best comedy of 2017. But for the moment, I have no idea when I’ll even be able to watch it again. And that’s a GOOD thing. The BEST thing. Because if you take nothing else away from this overlong, rambling, self-serving odyssey, take at least this: movies don’t have to be *just* entertainment. Don’t ever pretend that they’re only distractions, only ephemeral, only “content” designed to generate money and nothing else. Don’t ever pretend that they can’t change the way you see the world, the way you see yourself, or the way you see others.

Don’t EVER pretend that movies don’t matter.


In the early Spring of my Junior year of college, I woke up one morning feeling odd. My legs were asleep. And I got up and moved about and did all the normal human things I needed to do to get to class, but I didn’t feel…humanly normal. The pins and needles didn’t subside. I could feel my feet and my knees disagreeing with each other as I walked. But I told myself it’d go away. Got through one class – it didn’t. Got through another class – it didn’t. In fact, as I drove home late that afternoon, it didn’t go away so much that I actually realized I shouldn’t be driving, as I couldn’t press either the gas or brake pedals as hard as I intended.

As I got into my apartment, I started getting sick to my stomach, knowing I was going to fail at my ritual. We had an eight-foot ceiling, and every day I got home from class, I jumped up and touched it. Why? I don’t know, because I could, and it was easy. It’s something short people do to make us feel better about not being able to fucking dunk, OK? Let me have my thing.

As suspected, I couldn’t jump and touch the ceiling. And to be even clearer: I couldn’t jump AT ALL.

The rest of that day is a blur. I had three roommates, and I know I must have seen them at some point. I must have said something about what was happening. But I can’t recall it. I also can’t recall phoning my father to tell him that something was seriously wrong, but I know I did, and I know he could tell I was terrified, because he talks about making the three-hour drive down to Virginia in two hours and fifteen minutes like he once piloted a space shuttle through the eye of a hurricane. I kind of remember getting into his car, and I kind of remember driving back to Pennsylvania. I don’t remember him putting me on the couch in his basement (it was the most comfortable couch), and I do remember him telling me we were going to the hospital some time later.

I remember everything that happened immediately after that pretty fucking clearly. Because that was the first time I was aware my legs no longer worked.

I know my dad was on his way down to help me, but I was determined to “beat” whatever was happening and get up to the first floor kitchen by myself. My dad found me several agonizing minutes later, ripping my elbows to shreds, trying to drag my useless lower half up the stairs. My feet were there, but they weren’t…there.

The next 24 hours or so? Another blur. Went to the ER, which immediately sent me to get an MRI. MRI showed severe swelling on my brain and spinal cord. Why? Good question! Treatment? Hey, maybe! They admitted me to the hospital, pumped me full of steroids to stop the inflammation and some other stuff that I can’t recall the names of as a “just in case”, and extracted enough blood to send a hungry vampire into a delightful nonischemic priapism. I also got a spinal tap. On one hand, it was as good a time as any for one of those, because I was officially paralyzed from the chest down at this point, so my lumbar region was out-to-lunch numb. All the same, when they actually stuck the needle in – and I have no idea if this was psychosomatic or an actual physical impulse – an electrical charge went through my skull that made my eyes feel like they were melting, and I screamed like a bratty toddler.

Which was appropriate, because the hospital was full to the brim and they’d stuck me in the Children’s Wing. I don’t feel bad about a lot in my life, but I’ve stayed up entire nights ever since terrified that some poor kid with a heart condition or lupus or whatever heard me lose my shit from down the hall and had nightmares on top of his or her regular nightmares.

It went on like that for some time – me laying there, 66% immobile, waiting for news, letting them suck the blood out of me, hearing about inconclusive or negative labs, laying there, waiting around some more. My doctors were great. I remember specifically my Infectious Diseases doctor – whose name I’m embarrassed to have forgotten – was this West African guy who was chill enough to have invented Reggae, and man, was he smooth. “I’m pretty smart,” he told me at the outset, “so one way or another, we’re going to figure this out.” And he said it in such a cool, matter-of-fact way in that dazzlingly charming accent that I COMPLETELY disregarded the fact that he never mentioned whether or not I was going to walk again, let alone survive. I was just like, “Dude has it. I’m in good shape.” Meanwhile he was probably thinking, “Man, if this kid borks it I am going to learn a TON from the autopsy.”

Mostly I remember my dad. Now, real quick, I’m going to offer a pathetic apology to my mother. I’m sorry about this next bit, Mom. You were there early and often, and you were supportive and wonderful, and I don’t want to make it seem for a second like you weren’t a part of holding me together. You was a HUGE part of it. But, for the life of me, from my time actually in the hospital…I only remember you being there in bits and pieces. Why that is I don’t think I’ll ever be sure, but I think it has *something* to do with a conversation my dad and I had on Day Two.

I was hemming and hawing about something related to, you know, being paralyzed. There weren’t a ton of answers early, and mostly I was just mouthing off because I’m an asshole with a vastly outsized ego and I think I kept trying to tell people, “If they’d just let me WORK with them, for Christ’s sake, we could probably figure this out quicker.” I mean, if anyone ever built a statue to impotent (literally, my penis didn’t work at this time either, though having never been impressive before or since, it’s not like the world had temporarily lost an object of note), misdirected dipshit anger, a bronze of Geoff In Hospital Bed would work beautifully. So my father, who somehow had infinite patience with me for the first time since I was in elementary school, shut me down.

“Why are you bothering to worry about all this?”

THAT was a little stunning. I just looked at him.

“Can you get up and walk down to the lab? Poke around and find some answers? Would you even know what to look for? Would you know what to do if you DID know what to look for? You think you’re smarter than these doctors? You think your zero years of medical school training and zero years of doctoring can help them? What is it, exactly, that you can do right now that you’re so worried about getting it done?”

I looked at him some more. It was the only action I’d performed adequately in days.

“It’s out of your control. Completely. You can’t do a goddamned thing right now about your legs not working. So why are you sitting there worrying about it? Why don’t you just relax and wait until something comes along that you SHOULD worry about?”

I spent more than a month in the hospital. I never worried about a single thing for a single second after that. Because Dad was right. I was no longer captain of my own ship. I just had to sit back, breathe a bit, and hope the boat eventually sailed back to me. Splashing around in the ocean was pointless.

Not long after that, we got answers. I had something called transverse myelitis. Long story short (which, in a piece this babblingly protracted, is a REALLY fucking smug claim to make): your nerves are lined with a fatty sheath called myelin that helps bounce the signals from your brain to your body parts. But a virus had recently invaded my spinal column and infected the fluid, and that infection destroyed all the myelin in my nerves from my chest down. So no signals were getting from my brain to anywhere past my nipples. And let me tell you something: you haven’t really lived until your nipples have become a corporeal line of demarcation.

Soon after, they pinpointed the culprit: CMV, a common virus that like 75% of the population has bumbling about inside them, but innocuously. I just happened to (probably) pick it up when I’d had my tonsils out the month beforehand and my immune system was functioning on its low end. So they’d give me this medicine, and this medicine, and this treatment, and then give me an implant in my arm, and I’d go home and do chemotherapy for three weeks through that, and then they’d take it out, and I’d do a little physical therapy, and I’d be back to normal in like six months or a year.

That was it. I was going to be OK.

Six months later? I was. Everything came back – some stuff only like 95%, but overall, I’m not going to complain about it. Yeah, sports were no longer a real option. My knees and my feet never renegotiated their contract, and I can’t move like I used to, and goddamnit, does it make me angry trying to navigate that. Tennis is the worst. I had to learn all new mechanics, and I was never that good to begin with, but I fucking suck now. That in mind, if my biggest problem after all the suspended motion is not being able to hit a ball with a stick…I think I’ll take it.

Fast-forward to my senior year of college, and I’m back to normal. Early in the Fall I head up to Pennsylvania for my final check-in with my neurologist. From him I get a clean bill of health and a total lack of concern, and, hey, rock on. It’s over, I’m told – the vast majority of transverse myelitis cases are monophasic, meaning they never reoccur.  Time to put it all behind me. And yet, as I’m about to leave, I stop and I ask him something I’d never thought to ask him before. I guess because I was busy being So Unworried About Things Out of My Control (TM) back in the hospital.

“Hey doc, just out of curiosity…how bad was my case? Like, on a scale of one to ten.” He sort of thought over it for a minute, almost like he was going over a complex chart in his head. The more he fussed silently over it, the more I felt I’d conquered a veritable world-destroyer of a malady. Like, I St. George’d the shit out of that shit.

“Probably…a three?”

I am, naturally, completely fucking insulted.

“A THREE?”

“Yeah, if you think about it. Most of my patients are permanently paralyzed to one degree or another. Some have to live out the rest of their lives on a ventilator because we don’t discover the source before it spreads to the point the myelin never regenerates. I’ve had two patients die.”

I’m conscious in this moment that I’ve dropped my backpack on the floor.

“How close was I…”

He nods at me, knowing what I was going to ask before I did. “Your dad never said anything, huh?”

“Never said anything about what,” I think but don’t ask. I just stand there. For all intents and purposes, I was paralyzed again.

“If you’d gotten to the hospital eight hours later, you never would have walked again. Another eight hours after that? A machine would be doing your breathing for you right now.”

That was sixteen years ago. And until this Spring, I didn’t remember a single second of the rest of that day.


There was some point during my screening of THE BIG SICK where I realized I wasn’t “enjoying” the movie like I was sure I was going to. And, you know, what the fuck? It was about me! I mean, I was never a girl and never in a coma, but I was super-duper sick in the hospital with my family milling about and no one was sure what was going on. I can relate! And hey, co-writer and former coma-haver Emily Gordon clearly survived, because the movie exists, so…happy ending! And I’m laughing! A lot! So why are my feet bouncing uncontrollably and why am I chewing my finger the hell off and why am I having a goddamned panic attack!?!?!?

Let’s get back to Ray Romano for a second. Ray Romano is not, in actuality, much like my dad – at least in character, in this movie. He’s guarded and insular and deliberate. My father is talkative and outgoing and gregarious and, at times, obnoxiously so. Except, when I was in the hospital…he wasn’t so much himself. He was…guarded. And insular. And deliberate. Now, he was always *there* – and I do mean always. The dude rarely went home and was around for every consultation, major or minor, and always made sure he knew at least as much about what was going on as every nurse or doctor or orderly that walked into my room, to the point – and I wish to Christ I was making this up – he once got in an argument with some poor bastard about whether or not I was saddled with the right catheter. But he was quieter. Not distant, but…sometimes detached, even if just a bit?

As I watched Romano’s Terry gruff and grumble his way through THE BIG SICK, trying to hold it together and make sense of a world that he felt was slowly abandoning the only person he was put on Earth to protect, I realized I was watching my own father sputter and flail right in front of my eyes.

And I thought I had come to watch a movie about ME.

At one point – and I’m honestly afraid to go back and discover exactly which scene – Terry is trying to gather as much information from one of Emily’s doctors as he can, and he’s asking every question he can think of. And most of the questions he can think of are: the worst questions. Because you have to know. You just have to. And it was during this scene that I felt the most insane punch in my stomach and honest to God felt like I was going to puke on my shoes in the middle of a packed-t0-the-gills movie theater. Because all of a sudden, I was standing back in my neurologist’s office.

“Your dad never said anything, huh?”

I was so focused that afternoon on thinking over and over and over about what could have happened to me – but didn’t – that I never once stepped out of my own stupid head for just a minute to consider what HAD happened to my dad. Because, just like Terry – and unlike me – he DID ask the worst questions. For hours, the doctors didn’t know what was wrong with me, how to treat it, or if they even could; so for hours, my father didn’t know if I was going to live or die. For days, they didn’t know if they could contain what was happening; so for days, my dad didn’t know if I was going to get better or worse. For a week, they didn’t know what my long term prognosis would be; so for a a week, my dad didn’t know if I’d be able to function on my own anymore. All he could do was sit there with me. And not know with them.

Later, in the car on the way home from Century City, I was a mess. I honestly had no clue how poorly I’d processed and how casually I’d bundled up and childishly buried that entire ordeal. And I couldn’t figure out why I kept circling back to the speech Dad gave me in the hospital when I was spinning out, frustrated and angry and helpless and immobile. And then I realized: he’d tricked me.

He needed to tell me something that he couldn’t tell me because I couldn’t listen. So he took the fabric of the words he needed to say, cut it up into pieces and sewed the bits together into a message now tailored for my ears to hear so that my brain could understand it. And he wasn’t teaching me about The Things I Could Control and the Things I Couldn’t (TM).

He was promising me, “I’m going to be scared for you now. So you don’t have to be.”

About forty microseconds after realizing that, I remembered what happened that day that I left my neurologist’s office. shaken, having been rated a Three out of Ten. I walked in the door to my dad’s house, found him snoring on the couch (he has legitimate low-grade narcolepsy and I have never seen another human post up for a nap like he does – it’s a minor Wonder of the World), and headed up to my room to sulk for an hour. Not about what HAD happened to me, but what COULD HAVE happened to me. I sulked about a bullet dodged. I sulked about missing seven weeks of Spring Semester. I sulked about how annoying it was that I now sucked at tennis.

What didn’t happen? Me thanking my father. For everything. For anything. It’s since become one of the biggest regrets of my life.

But here’s the silver lining: that’s where THE BIG SICK comes in. Because of it, I get to atone for that regret before it’s too late. Because Emily and Kumail put their lives on film and did it with feeling and gravity and, my God, heart. And they got career-best work from Michael Showalter and Ray Romano and Holly Hunter and Zoe Kazan, and the combination of all of it helped me realize something I’d been blind to for goddamned near half my life. It was a movie that was supposed to make laugh – and it did. But it ended up being a movie that made me better.

How do you thank a bunch of strangers for something like that in any meaningful manner? I don’t know if you can. So I have to hope that if any of them ever read this, the following suffices in lieu of any lame superlatives I could clumsily offer:

The doctors and nurses treated me and healed me, and there’s nothing I could do to repay them properly. They’re the reason I’m able to use my hands to type this, the reason I’m able to walk my dogs every morning, the reason I’m able to get myself off the floor after I fall down laughing at something. They’re the reason my post-sickness has been an infinitely lovelier and more worthwhile experience than my pre-sickness. And for that I’ll be forever grateful. They saved my body.

But my father saved my life.

I’m sorry it took me so long to say this, but: thank you, Pop. Thank you for being scared so that I didn’t have to be.

My father and I are very different people who live very different lives and see the world in very different ways. Sometimes, it’s incredibly hard to relate, try as we might. Sometimes it’s hard to see eye-to-eye. Sometimes talking fails. Sometimes…there’s just nothing to say.

But sometimes? Rapidly-moving pictures projected on a big screen in a dark room with dozens of strangers show you what you couldn’t see, and say what you couldn’t articulate. And you feel closer to someone in that moment, twenty-five hundred miles away, than you did when you were three feet from them in a hospital room. And you understand them better than you ever hoped to. And you appreciate them more than you ever realized. And you love them more than you ever thought possible.

Don’t ever pretend that movies don’t matter.

1 Comment

CHARLIE’S STORY

Oct05
by DrGMLaTulippe on 05/10/2016 at 12:45 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

(EDITOR’S NOTE: I posted this a little earlier today as a series of Twitters, and it got such a nice response that I thought I’d collect it here in a more coherent form.)

Quick story: I can count on probably four hands the number of times friends or family have stumbled into my place a little tripped out. Always the same look on their face, and they always start their explanation as to why the same:

“Uh, I just ran into one of your neighbors, I think…”

And I’m always able to finish the story. “…and he was like a thousand years old and he showed you his tattoo.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That’s Charlie.”

Charlie is 97 years old, about four and a half feet tall, and still in possession of a thick Germanic accent. His tattoo is a faded line of crude numbers, an identification given to him at Auschwitz.

At some point, he shows everyone. And if he gets the sense you’re a visitor to our building, he shows you immediately. Talks about it. Obviously, this is a little jarring for most. One second you’re in an elevator with this ancient, smiling little guy, the next it’s Nazis and death. But he’s so kind and so sprightly, and it’s impossible not to engage him about it. Especially because he just wants you to know he survived. And to make sure you know that, because he survived – the only member of his family to do so – he’s more or less determined to be immortal. And it’s not as if he’s just hanging around idly. Half the day, he walks the neighborhood. Every Monday, he volunteers at Cedars. The guy is ACTIVE.

Anyway, I ran into Charlie on my way to the corner store this morning. As always, I ask how he’s doing. As always, he answers the same:

“Can’t complain! God has seen fit to keep me around for another day, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll find he’s kept me around for one more!” Big smile. So we chatted for a second, and he talked about spending a few hours at the synagogue this week. “Because I’m Jewish, you know.” I do, and I giggle at the adorable but unnecessary reminder. But then he got somewhat melancholy. He told me he spent most of the time thinking about his family.

He talks about his family a lot. When he does, he usually talks about his kids and grandkids and, I’m guessing, great-grandkids, who come over in various shifts to hang out with him, shuffle him from place to place, take him to dinner. But today, for the first time, he talked about the family he lost in the Holocaust. His parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins.

“Over one hundred of us. One hundred! And I’m the only one who survived. I can’t explain it to people. Can you imagine?”

I can’t, Charlie.

He goes on to tell me that when he comes across people he doesn’t know, if they’ll stop to talk to him, he shows them his tattoo. And he’ll talk about his mother, an uncle, a cousin. All lost to time, he says, but not to him. Because he talks to people. And remembers.

And if the people he talks to remember their conversation…maybe they’re not lost to time after all.

On 1 November, Charlie turns 98. He’s going to go out to dinner with his kids. Volunteer an extra day at Cedars. Y’know, 98 year-old stuff. So maybe, on that day, take a second to think about Charlie and his family.

I have a feeling he’d like that.

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