Maharaja’s Burra Peg & Ginger Iced Tea
My first heart drawing. Oil pastel & graphite on bristol board. 2017 www.sarahgreenereed.com
My second heart drawing. Oil pastel, calligraphy ink & graphite on bristol board. 2017 www.sarahgreenereed.com
From the crazy quilt that Mom made for my sister, this is a digital image on fabric of our Mallette St. house decorated for Christmas with embroidered wreaths.
Mom always loved to get her granddaughters matching Christmas outfits. There would usually be two each year: one formal / one casual. Elisabeth and I tried to keep the tradition alive when she died. The black cherry patterned dresses in the upper right corner of the grid were from December of 2018 (Mom died that October). Each year it was a BIG DISCUSSION! Lots of emails about dresses. This was one of my favorite traditions.
My sister Elisabeth’s first Christmas at the Volberg house in Kingsport, TN. Must have been 1969. With my great grandmother, Dee Dee, my Nonnie, Granddaddy, Mom & Dad.
Christmas at the Reed house in Kingsport, TN in 1978.
Christmas at the Reed house in Kingsport, TN in 1979. I’m in front with Grandpa, Grandma, Aunt Jane Dad & Mom.
Twister was big in 1979! Christmas at the Reed house in Kingsport, TN.
Christmas at the Reed house in Kingsport, TN in 1989.
Mom played piano for our Christmas Eve Carol tradition. (top image)
Here she is showing some kids the harpsichord she built at a Christmas party at her Carolina Meadows house. Probably 2013 or so.
The three amigos. Me, my sister and Mom in Jerusalem for the top image in 1974 (I think?) and then in Northern California for the bottom image. Mom and Dad were at Stanford my freshman year of college and Elisabeth and I went out for Christmas. This would have been December 1990.
You know how your iPhone will just randomly pull up images from ages ago with seemingly no rhyme or rhythm to the selection? I’ve tried to figure it out – perhaps it’s an anniversary of the photo? Nope. A photo of someone you’ve recently seen? Not really. I have no idea what the algorithm is. Anyway, recently an image of a drawing I did in late 2017 popped up on my phone. It was an oil pastel of an anatomical heart, kind of a rarity since I was pretty much exclusively drawing florals at that point. I did two of these hearts and I’m not sure why. I was just attracted to the imagery. These two drawings found homes with friends of mine. I framed them up, delivered them, and then kind of went on with my life. When Mom got diagnosed with terminal cancer of the heart months later I got a chill down my spine when I thought about these drawings. Mom’s diagnosis seemed sudden and out of the blue but it turned out that she had been having heart issues for a while. Mom was wearing a heart monitor during Christmas of 2017, just a month or two after these drawings were made. How strange. I shared this revelation with my aunt Lisa, a writer, who agreed that the timing was remarkable. She confessed to me that around the same time she had been researching how sick patients were evacuated from an ocean liner for her her book Swan Song: An Odyssey. (If you’ve been reading this blog all along you may recall that Mom was life flighted off the Queen Mary 2 in gale force winds when her heart went nuts.). Lisa and I both felt kind of weird about the synchronicity around these events.
I think there’s a lot going on beneath the surface that we’re not really aware of. Since Mom died I’ve been open to noticing “coincidences” or, as I prefer to call them, “signs”. (Dad, I see you rolling your eyes.). Songs come on that are too on the nose with the current situation to be accidental, a road sign or sticker might appear referencing something I’ve been talking about…. I like to think they’re little breadcrumbs from my mom. These little bits of magic are the silver lining of losing your parent. I notice things more, take less for granted. At least that’s the hope.
I now firmly believe that Mom was well into her illness during Christmas of 2017. She didn’t die until October of 2018, but Spring and Summer of 2018 were not great. My husband and I hosted Christmas in Austin that holiday. Mom felt bad and went to bed. This wasn’t abnormal. She had reoccurring migraines and often worked herself so hard getting ready for an event that she ended up knocking herself out on the actual day and couldn’t enjoy it. We had many a holiday where the house was beautifully decorated, gifts were thoughtfully purchased, delicious food was prepared…. and then Mom felt like crap. In these instances a migraine would flare up and she would take a pill and go back to bed. It was disappointing for everyone, but, honestly, probably most for her. Mom didn’t like to disappoint people, but what are you going to do? Christmas morning would get pushed back to Christmas afternoon. It wasn’t as planned but when it finally happened it was lovely.
Well, this last Christmas we had together was especially a disappointment because Mom forced herself to get up to celebrate Christmas Eve with us. She was VERY BIG into tradition and one of ours was to sing Christmas Carols after a formal dinner. (My family sings in parts, I have the Episcopal Hymnals to prove it.) Mom was acutely aware of her mortality even before she knew she was dying. She realized that she only had so many Christmases with her granddaughters and she wanted to make sure that our family traditions were firmly instilled in them. So, instead of lying in bed as she probably should have done that year, Mom got up. And that was a mistake. I’m not going to get into it but things didn’t go as planned and Mom couldn’t roll with it. Her tolerance for conflict was diminished and her usual Southern manners just gave up. Mom lost it over something small. We were all shocked. And I was mad. Needless to say the following Christmas morning wasn’t great and we just plowed through the holiday until everyone got to go home.
This sucked for me. I’m Dale’s daughter. I hosted the hell out of that Christmas: cooking, cleaning, planning….. and it was a huge disappointment. So, I held a grudge. It was normal for me to not talk much to Mom and Dad even in regular circumstances, they were just so busy with their projects and travel. We would shoot off emails to each other every now and then or Mom would share a craft or something via Facebook. But, after this incident I retreated even further. I really didn’t talk to Mom much at all until that summer when we went on the Queen Mary 2 with my entire family. What a waste of a last year with someone you love. I guess my point, if I have one, is that you never know how much time you’ve got with a person so maybe try to make things right sooner rather than later. Take it from me, I learned the hard way.
I’m currently on a plane flying from Maine to Texas, dreading the impending heat but excited –and slightly apprehensive – about dropping off my daughter at the University of Texas for her first year. I plan to take my hard earned lesson to heart with the next generation, to make the effort to stay in touch, to be kind and generous with forgiveness. We’re all just messy humans trying to do our best. I don’t know if you all are podcast people or not, I’m kind of late to the game on that. But, as I mentioned in my last post, I listened to Glennon Doyle’s We Can Do Hard Things while painting the attic and her interview with the poet Andrea Gibson was remarkable. Andrea read one of her works called Tincture. It blew me away. Thinking about Mom’s heart and her migraines and her dying body, I found this poem by Gibson especially relevant:
TINCTURE
Imagine, when a human dies, the soul misses the body, actually grieves the loss of its hands and all they could hold. Misses the throat closing shy reading out loud on the first day of school. Imagine the soul misses the stubbed toe, the loose tooth, the funny bone. The soul still asks, Why does the funny bone do that? It’s just weird. Imagine the soul misses the thirsty garden cheeks watered by grief. Misses how the body could sleep through a dream. What else can sleep through a dream? What else can laugh? What else can wrinkle the smile’s autograph? Imagine the soul misses each falling eyelash waiting to be a wish. Misses the wrist screaming away the blade. The soul misses the lisp, the stutter, the limp. The soul misses the holy bruise blue from that army of blood rushing to the wound’s side. When a human dies, the soul searches the universe for something blushing, something shaking in the cold, something that scars, sweeps the universe for patience worn thin, the last nerve fighting for its life, the voice box aching to be heard. The soul misses the way a body would hold another body and not be two bodies but one pleading god doubled in grace. The soul misses how the mind told the body, You have fallen from grace. And the body said, Erase every scripture that doesn’t have a pulse. There isn’t a single page in the bible that can wince, that can clumsy, that can freckle, that can hunger. Imagine the soul misses hunger, emptiness, rage, the fist that was never taught to curl-curled, the teeth that were never taught to clench, clenched, the body that was never taught to make love-makes love like a hungry ghost digging its way out of the grave. The soul misses the unforever of old age, the skin that no longer fits. The soul misses every single day the body was sick, the now it forced, the here it built from the fever. Fever is how the body prays, how it burns and begs for another average day. The soul misses the legs creaking up the stairs, misses the fear that climbed up the vocal cords to curse the wheelchair. The soul misses what the body could not let go-what else could hold on that tightly to everything? What else could hear the chain of a swing set fall and fall to its knees? What else could touch a screen door and taste lemonade? What else could come back from a war and not come back? But still try to live? Still try to lullaby? When a human dies, the soul moves through the universe trying to describe how a body trembles when it’s lost, softens when it’s safe, how a wound would heal given nothing but time? Do you understand? Nothing in space can imagine it. No comet, no nebula, no ray of light can fathom the landscape of awe, the heat of shame. The fingertips pulling the first gray hair and throwing it away. I can’t imagine it, the stars say. Tell us again about goosebumps. Tell us again about pain.
Also, just today, we listened to Dax Shepard’s podcast interview with the actor Ethan Hawke while driving the hour and a half to the airport in Portland. Hawke is kind of easy to make fun of, he’s earnest and intense. I’ve seen him on the street in Brooklyn twice and he always looks kind of schlubby. But, you know what? Ethan Hawke is WHAT’S UP. Talk about intentional living. Talk about pushing yourself creatively. Talk about doing the hard work. Hawke directed a TV series called “The Last Movie Stars” about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. I’m now dying to watch it. Hawke was approached by Newman’s kids to do this project. He admits that he didn’t have experience working on a documentary like this but that he’s done a lot of other weird projects so he figured he would give it a shot. Hawke is not afraid to fail, something I find commendable and compelling. The story of Newman and Woodward is a grand romance, complete with all the messy bits. Hawke did not shy away from the unflattering stuff, that wouldn’t have been honest. Instead, he chose to show the flaws and difficult parts and prove that this couple was so BADASS that they could transcend it all. Mom had her messy bits, too, but she was definitely a badass.
UPDATE:
I just got home to a 90 degree house (at night!) in Texas. Our air conditioning broke while we were gone. I’m looking through Mom’s recipe files and food does not sound appealing. It’s too hot to eat. So, today you’re getting drink recipes: one with booze / one not. Stay cool, people!
MAHARAJA’S BURRA PEG
“Peg” is the old English term for a jigger, but in British Colonial India it also named cocktails made with a “peg” of whiskey or brandy—like this one. While researching his Time-Life Foods of the World series book, American Cooking: Southern-Style, Eugene Walter was served this lovely drink by Mrs. Henrietta Waring, widow of Dr. Antonio Waring, a leading Savannah pediatrician in the middle of the last century. Champagne cocktails and punches have always been popular with Savannah’s dolce vita set, and Mrs. Waring believed the concoction to be her father’s invention, but most likely, he had a copy of Charles Baker’s The Gentleman’s Companion (1937) in his library. Within this lively two-volume treatise on his experiences eating and drinking his way through Southeast Asia, Baker included an encounter with this cocktail in Manila.
Serves 4
1 lime
4 sugar cubes
Angostura bitters
4 ounces cognac or single-barrel bourbon
Ice-cold medium dry champagne
Peel 4 long, thin curls of zest from the lime with the large side blade of a zester. Put the sugar cubes on a saucer and sprinkle them with droplets of bitters until they are saturated but not falling apart. Put a sugar cube each 4 champagne flutes.
Put a jigger of cognac in each flute and then fill it with champagne. Garnish with the curls of lime zest, either hanging on the rim or floating in the cocktail, and serve at once.
Variation—King’s Peg: a similar recipe appeared in an old edition of Christ Church Cook Book roughly contemporary with Eugene Walter’s book. To make it, omit the lime and bitters and garnish the cocktail with a twist of lemon zest.
GINGER ICED TEA
For homemade ginger iced tea, slice a 1-inch piece of fresh ginger into
thin coins and smash. Heat the ginger and 5 tea bags in 1 quart of
spring water in a nonreactive saucepan until dark colored, very steamy,
and small bubbles form on the bottom and sides of the pan (the
temperature should reach about 190 degrees), 10 to 15 minutes. Take the
pan off the heat and steep for 3 minutes. Remove and discard the tea
bags and ginger; pour the tea into a pitcher. Stir in 1 to 6 tablespoons
sugar, if desired, until dissolved. Stir in 1 quart ice until melted.
Serve in ice-filled glasses.
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