Conjugating

He had a quiet knack for turning the present into the future.
That’s what life is, isn’t it?
Doing something now that will result in what happens next?
Like playing Jenga.
Building a structure, keeping things in balance as we watch it grow taller.

What makes Jenga a game is that we have to start removing pieces which throws things off balance and eventually, the tower tumbles. That’s how that game is played. It’s a metaphor. A possibility for what can, and often does, happen in life.

But my father seemed prescient. He seemed to know in all cases that doing this or that would make everything OK. Like doing your homework and practicing the piano and eating spinach.

As a child, I had “curvature of the spine”. At the time I wasn’t sure what that meant, but certain things happened because of it: I was given ballet lessons starting at age 3; I had to do certain exercises, like stand in a corner of our living room, one hand on each wall, arms bent, and push my elbows back, trying to get them to touch, and every night, I would lie on my back on the kitchen table while my father held my feet down and I did sit ups. What also happened was that my mother developed a command: “Stand up straight!” that she barked without even looking at me, assuming the worst.

I think all that stopped when I was about 12 or 13. I don’t know why. I assume that my parents had much better things to do and perhaps I was instructed to carry on by myself, now that the foundation had been laid. It all worked. I continued dancing and exercising, doing yoga. I even modeled. My posture is great. Everything posture-wise is in balance.

Cooking can be like that. Follow the recipe and you’ll get the anticipated results. Although in cooking, the variables can often be mysterious and the outcome really disappointing. For example:

At Harry’s American Bar, upstairs, in Venice, Italy, I had risotto primavera that I have since dreamed about for thirty something years. It was simply the most delicious thing ever. So when Harry Cipriani opened a restaurant in the Sherry Netherland in Manhattan, my friend Johanne and I went with enormous giddy hyperventilating anticipation. The physical place was a knock out. Almost an exact duplicate of Harry’s in Venice! Gorgeous wood paneling, the fixtures, floors, furnishings. The creamy white tablecloths. The place settings. Everything! And the waiters! If they weren’t Italian, they acted like they were Italian and having a hard time speaking English but doing a good and elegant job of it. Perfect service.

Of course I ordered risotto primavera. It was nothing – NOTHING – like what I had eaten in Italy! The reasons for this could be many. Even though the identical recipe may have been followed, the water was different. New York City has excellent tasting water, but it is not the same as Venice’s. Even if the vegetables were just as fresh, they were not grown in Italian soil warmed by Italian sun, cut on Italian cutting boards. Or SOMETHING! The two dishes were worlds apart, continents apart, oceans apart, years apart. My disappointment could not be masked. Decades of yearning tumbled like a Jenga tower.

Just yesterday a friend said that she had been looking for udon noodles as good as those she’d had in Japan. ”You’ll never find them” I assured her. Then I told her about the risotto primavera. She acknowledged the truth of that lesson. We may perhaps find equally good, though different. Perhaps even better. But never quite the same.

So how did my father know that doing this and that would guarantee good results? How was he SO wise? I have come to realize that he wasn’t. He just did his best, like most of us, and took his chances. He was generally lucky.

Daddy had two mantras. One was “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” That golden rule was his religion. He lived by it and was surprised and disappointed when others in the world did not.
He took it hard.

He smoked Herbert Tareyton unfiltered cigarettes for more than 50 years. We might say that he was pressing his luck, not following his seemingly innate example of doing today what will benefit you tomorrow. It contradicted everything we knew about him and everything I’ve written here. That is because we forgot that Daddy’s second mantra – born of a life of experience and observation - was: “Life is a crap shoot.”

Luckily, he never got lung cancer.

He died of brain cancer.

None of us saw that coming, thus proving how ultimately prescient he was in the choice of his second mantra.