i chose cavatappi

In the same vein as Jacques Pepin's fridge soup, I often make pantry pasta salad. The bulk of the ingredients come from the pantry, though there are refrigerated items as well. My pasta dish likely leans a certain way because my pantry is normally stocked with those items, whereas your storage shelves might be filled with other options. 

The salad is never quite the same each time. I may use dandelions if I have them, or cilantro in place of parsley. Maybe make a version with radishes and walnuts. Get it? Basically, a by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of dish.

Last week and last-minute at that, I tried to look at my choices with fresh eyes, and this is what came together rather nicely for our weekly cul-de-sac Happy Hour. A few ingredients are given in quantity or weight, but this is a common sense recipe. Add however much of each item as you like.

Pantry Pasta Salad

1 pound dried pasta (shapes rather than strings)
2 cans five-ounce each, albacore
Olives, black and green, sliced as preferred
Peppadews, several sliced (pimentos would be a good sub)
Golden raisins, soaked in rum for a while, then drained
3-4 scallions, white and green parts
Salt & Pepper
Pine Nuts, toasted
Parsley, chopped Italian
Vinaigrette, 6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil,
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar (I followed a 3 to 1 ration)


Cook pasta to al dente. Drain and rinse with cold water. (Salads are the only time to rinse pasta!) Drain well.

In a large bowl, flake the tuna by hand then add half the pasta and half of the remaining ingredients. Toss with half the vinaigrette, then repeat with the remaining half of everything.

This makes a buffet table size bowl. Reduce or increase quantity. Leftover refrigerated salad should be brought to room temperature and may need additional dressing added.

my red velvet journal

It is not anything I would wish for anyone to endure: infertility.

My journey was private, most of it not shared even with those closest to me.

Mine was very much a lonely, solo trip.

Once you have children, your life will never be the same, my mother would say. She loved my sister and me without question, but if given the choice in hindsight, I think she would be honest and decline having kids.

I didn't have a choice at the time, but if a little farther into adulthood, I was granted a do-over, I too would decline the pursuit. No regrets.

The yearning years were painful though, and it was sometime then when I ran across this lone stanza. It sucked me in and I tucked it in a journal where it still resides. Eerie that at the time, the house which wished to be a home was a late 1800's farm style two story, with a stairway visible the minute you entered.  

                As I was going up the stair

                        I met a boy who wasn't there

                                He wasn't there again today

                                        I wish that he would go away 

Bastardized version from the poem, Antigonish

by William Hughes Mearns

why me?

 "I cried, out of helplessness and delight,
because for a moment life gave me more than
I had any right to expect."

I once read that Pat Conroy said his sister didn't speak to him for a few years after he wrote The Prince of Tides. That has stuck with me, so it is with tremendous but ignored trepidation that I share this. The dearest in my world will recognize themselves though maybe not each other.

Earlier this month, I wasn't feeling myself.  I knew I was physically fine, but I felt as heavy and as stuck as a boulder in concrete and I didn't know why.

I wasn't sad or depressed. I went about daily life. I enjoyed wine and food as I always do, and W made me genuinely laugh every single day as she always does.  Yet I had lost every whisper of my usual lightness of being. My internal ache had not yet localized. I was exhausted but didn't need sleep.

Very late one Sunday night I received a message from my friend I call The Intuitive. I love her. I fear her. She has juju. She has that type of juju I often wish I had and sometimes give thanks that I don't. 

She was checking on me, my energy popping up in her orbit.

I clarified that I was fine, though most everyone around me wasn't, and that I had even cancelled evening plans with W because I absolutely had to crash on the past Friday afternoon. Feeling the weight of the world, I escaped and indeed, slept like a rock for a few hours.

Could the tumbling down of my energy have been relayed to her?

My sister, though she is miraculously recovering so well from a recent stroke, remains foremost on my mind, but the number of people around me who are struggling, sick, or healing, is not exaggerated. 

People I care about deeply are enduring hardships and heartaches: 

-A dear ex-student/friend (born blind, smart as a whip, suffered a stroke a few years ago, recently became suddenly immobile) is in the hospital/rehab from pneumonia and a blood clot. Separate issues are requiring the future surgical removal of an eye.
-This student's angelic mother who cares for him and a husband newly diagnosed with Alzheimer's, is stretched to the max.
-Another ex-student, out of state, is transferring from one nursing facility to another, after months of living shelter to shelter, with no family support. He is limited to light perception and has many health issues.
-A friend with MS has had two difficult knee surgeries with extended rehab following each.
-A neighbor friend just lost a step-daughter, and not too long ago, her brother died.
-A neighbor/friend has had three heart procedures and a skin cancer removal scare, all in a very short period of time.
-A friend is engaged in stressful and expensive diligence to support her beloved pet in the dog's aging stages of kidney disease.
-A friend is depressed.
-A friend in the midst of a perfect storm of life: expensive house repairs, blood pressure glitches, numerous dental procedures, car severely damaged by an at-fault driver in a parking lot.
-A friend who is 96 and visually limited, is happily still living independently but with very few visitors and whose heart breaks missing the days of big family gatherings.

There but by the grace of God, go I.

Putting pen to paper always helps me sort things out. I am perceptive but I am not an empath. What I was experiencing, taking in so much concern for so many people, is what I will term thriver's guilt; steps removed from survivor's guilt, but still very, very real and very, very heavy.

Maybe for the first time, or the first that feels authentic, I fully embraced the ethos of the Serenity Prayer, and have made peace with my helplessness. 

Blessings and good health to everyone.

William Bryant Logan
The Jumping Dove
House Beautiful, December 1992

she did a thing

Jimmy's Food Store has always owned our hearts.

It was where W first flirted. Where then, after my head finally stopped madly spinning, we hung out many times in the cramped front space, drinking four dollar cups of wine with a loaf of good bread and thinly sliced smoked mozzarella. Occasionally olives and such. Occasionally a sandwich from the deli.

There were paper plates, napkins, and bottles of olive oil & balsamic vinegar on the narrow shelf at the front windows. Help yourself...

Those were the days! Those glorious days before Covid put an end to the intimate antipasti tables which have never returned. But Jimmy's is still our place and W still continuously flirts with me in any given, wonderfully cramped aisle we very leisurely peruse. 

Yesterday we popped in, designed as it usually is: order our wine and if possible chit chat with the beloved staff a bit, then check out the produce. We always buy tomatoes but the rest just depends. Sometimes it's great organic potatoes or local garden squash. It turned out that afternoon we chose three large green tomatoes to fry, and zucchini for a quiche I'll make.

Being a holiday weekend, the store was busy but W managed, against my pleas not to, to pull an owner aside with her special request...

Young Tony didn't hesitate to oblige. He led her to the front's interior window bar which he thought would be perfect. It is! He even offered W a pen for initialing, obviously aware of this romantic worldwide tradition. 

Though our hearts are forever bound to this iconic place, and we need no proof of our bond to each other, the Love-Lock allowed to be placed where it is, means so much. So, so, so much. We have permanently marked our spot very publicly yet so privately.

We enter and we'll greet it. We exit and we'll blow a kiss. I'll forever be grateful to Jimmy's for this; one of many genuine gestures we've been gifted from them across the years.

And as for W... I'm thrilled she ignored my pleas. I'm grateful. What an amazing gift!

I pray she never stops flirting.

could be

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Let your heart be light

Next year all our troubles will be out of sight

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Make the Yuletide gay

Next year all our troubles will be miles away

Once again, as in olden days

Happy golden days of yore

Faithful friends who are dear to us

Will be near to us once more

Someday soon, we all will be together

If the fates allow

Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

Stockings were opened, bubbly was poured by mid-day, love was ever-present in every breath I took, yet ... it felt like the oddest, off-kilter Christmas Day of the oddest Christmas season.

More so than the first Christmas following Spoke's death, or that of both parents' passing four years prior. More so than the several recent Christmases missing my sister who has cocooned on a mountaintop states away. Those were sad but I'm talking weird. This has been a Christmas season that feels undefinably off its axis. 

Could be the weather giving us unseasonably warm days which with the exception of this year, have a reputation for turning into cold spells that hit in time for the festivities to feel festive. This day-after is touting eighty-three degrees. 

Could the reason be our own lack of the extended family, which often is the driving force for the tremendous effort that produces extravagant holiday meals? I was, by choice, not present or at all invested in the kitchen this holiday, so there was no meaningful, shared Christmas table. 

Does quantity - of people, food, or gifts - truly define Christmas or spread more joy? Not sure. Maybe. 

These hours later, the fa-la-la-la-la put to bed, I've still no after-glow spirit. I'm not sad, nor am I close to figuring out the faint bit of bah humbug-ness that has hovered over me this season. 

It's obvious we live in a severely unconnected world. Instead of finding commonality, we often blindly support divisiveness. Minor differences to major conflicts seem the norm. We embrace our stances and those of the like-minded, be they culture, sports or politics. More gets under our skin more easily.   

As a child,  I remember the adult conversations; loud disagreements, while standing around the Weber grill, eventually faded as burgers were flipped. Their generation was just as divided but they were happier. Those people, in those days of yore, had a lightness of being not recognized today. 

That premise of lightness of being has been on my New Year's Resolution radar for decades. Every year I chase it. 

Maybe I've let myself become lax in my normally deep personal grounding of knowing myself and my faith, trusting myself and staying connected to the divine spirits. 

Perhaps I am what's off-kilter. 

Could very well be.

not a lecture but led

Last week I dragged a friend to see Elizabeth Gilbert speak at a local venue, the Eisemann Center. Same place I saw her several years ago.

The hour long show followed a couple of hours my friend and I spent with wine and good food at the Italian bar just on the opposite side of the theater’s crosswalk. 

Gilbert, author most famous for her book turned to film, Eat Pray Love, has a memoir just released, which seems to speak of struggles and joys within the final months of her friend-turned-lover’s life, battling cancer while they both enjoyed and fought addictions.

I very much enjoy her presentations; stories emerging from cobwebbed corners of a larger story, all coming together at some point in a finely woven web. I have twice now left Gilbert, anticipating the fun I will have absorbing all I just heard.

Her talks spark such curiosity and send me to rabbit holes, so once home that evening, I poured more wine and down I went.

The first concept that caught my attention came from a podcast interview where she exclaimed and then explained a phrase from a Celtic prayer: ‘I have no cherished outcome.’ Oh how that took my breath away and I will forever embrace this thought. 

The other was 12 Step Programs' suggestion of defining God as you wish your God to be, with the purpose of healing and moving forward. The theory is, The God of My Understanding.

This could be a bone of contention, considering all the angles by which people define, believe, accept, and trust in a higher power. Or waver, distrust, and dismiss. But some of Gilbert’s hopes and wishes in her description of her gifted God, I found moving. A few descriptions are touchingly reflective of my own.

Here are a random few of her wishful descriptions of the God of her understanding.

Not the word, but not against words

Not a series of laws but an offering of guidance

Not a silence but the silence beyond the silence

Not the breath but the breath adjacent

Impervious to logic

Unprovable but unmistakable

Gilbert sometimes presents outside my comforting, predictable zones, but I love her command of words and thoughts, and how much more deeply she makes me give pause.

I rather guiltily admit to having had expected cherished outcomes from my evening of perusing. The rabbit hole journeys did not disappoint. 

10.17.25