It will take me a while to land the plane that is this post, but I promise I will get there.
My solitude used to come in bite-sized pieces.
If Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club has single-serving friends on flights, then I certainly had single-serving moments of introspection. Six years of six a.m. flights. Of bad plane coffee. Of sprinting through CLT trying to make a hopeless connection. Of inconsistent WiFi and spotty access to charging. Of hour-long cab rides into the city, doing my makeup just as we hit the Midtown Tunnel, while turning the back seat into a mobile workstation. Of renting what was tantamount to an overpriced closet where I occasionally slept and more often did laundry. Of sustaining friendships with unexpected drop-ins.
Of measuring my life in miles.
2020 was – if it had continued as it began – going to be a banner year for business travel. I flew over 60,000 miles across 56 flights this year, 52 of which happened before March 15th. That old tale of the shark who dies if it stops swimming… that is the life of the business traveler. If you actually stopped to reflect on what you were doing, there would be just no way to make it work.
When all things came to a screeching halt with me “stranded” in California, I was forced to take that step back that I never wanted to take. I could have just as easily kept kicking the travel can down the road and telling myself sweet little lies like, “you’ll slow the pace of travel after this fiscal year” (said, of course, every fiscal year) or the even more insidious, “buck up, you’re tough enough to handle this.”
It’s not toughness, friends. It’s not fortitude. It’s stubbornness, pure and simple. And a healthy dash of fear of the unknown.
Could I be happy in one place? I can’t say I’ve ever really tried.
The truth is that I’ve lived a casually and ridiculously privileged bicoastal life, being neither here nor there, but just where I needed to be in the exact moment in time I needed to be there. The concept of a fixed “here” felt (and if I’m being honest, there are moments where it still feels) oppressive, and I would have surely cracked from Shelter-in-Place had I been cooped up alone in my Atlanta apartment.
I can’t say I believe in fate, but it was a stroke of pure luck that things stopped when I just happened to be in the Bay Area. They say you can’t go home again, but in many ways I think I have. The city is deeply different and yet my neighborhood feels exactly the same, with just a tiny bit of apocalyptic flair.
Having passed the 8 month mark from California SIP orders, my quarantimes look like this: 3.5 months each at my parents’ house and at my old/new building in the Mission, bisected by the most surreal month in Atlanta to pack my things. And though I was hardly isolated for 7 of those 8 months, it was impossible not to feel unmoored, adrift, listless, unenthused. Purposeless. Emotion I normally would ignore or kick down or push through. Or – when I was really in my feelings – go volunteer about. Those outlets I had nearly all are gone.
A quick digression: suffering is not an Olympic event. I’ve been incredibly incredibly lucky this pandemic and for that I’m so grateful, but it doesn’t mean that I haven’t had my frustrations. We all do, and we’re all allowed to feel them, and acknowledge them, and process them as we need to. Guilt is not a particularly utile emotion in times like these. Ours is a zeitgeist of ennui, to be sure. Universal as it comes.
Eventually, I turned to ritual in hopes of reclaiming some kind of anchor. And all of my rituals, my holidays, my family ties, all of it: they all seem to start or stop in the kitchen.
Cooking and baking tend not to be skills in which one acquires any true proficiency when one spends an average of ten nights (that is to say, twenty days) a month in hotels, on the road. In a way I’ve spent a lifetime of sponging up what I could, where I could: there was the after school cooking for kids program that my best friend’s mom ran from the teacher’s lounge at my elementary school—I still remember the lesson on folding batter. Or “baking” with my dad as a toddler, sometimes getting to stir but always getting to be the taste tester. Or at the elbows of my grandmothers, both excellent cooks with the mysterious kitchen idiosyncrasies that only old home cooks really can have. Or in that one soup kitchen in Manhattan that has access to a restaurant kitchen, but you have to be in Midtown by 5:30 on what is inevitably a frigid fall morning, worrying the whole way if the 5 will have issues, but the reward is getting to use an industrial mandolin and – hopefully – keep all your fingers. Or working in the phenomenal industrial kitchen in Atlanta where spaghetti is made in 40 gallon tilt skillets and stirred with what could only be described as an erstwhile rowboat oar.
Food justice and food equity are so important to me because it’s so primal, both in terms of human need and also in the satisfaction one gets from feeding others. I’m Italian: we cook to say we love you as much as we actually say the words.
I dabbled early in the year with what I ended up terming “Mik’s Quarantine Cucina,” basically Instagram stories of what I was cooking, how I was trying to make sense of our rapidly changing lifestyles, of the weird hoarding and ingredient shortages happening early on. It was nice to have something glib and fun and relatable and ended up being an easy way to stay connected to my East Coast friends and colleagues. You can get out of those awful “how are you?” conversations that everyone either lies about for politeness’s sake or gets too real and then you’re all in that rona pit together. We had something tangible to talk about that wasn’t more of the same, more of the quotidian exhaustion. It’s the same reason people got puppies and Pelotons, something to shake things up.
And so I threw myself into Thanksgiving cooking this year. That wasn’t particularly new; with no grandmas at the helm for the last 4 holiday seasons, I’ve certainly pitched in on dishes here and there. All the time, knowing I was missing the vital ingredient: old hands (as my zia says). I feel my grandmas’ absence most acutely at this time of year, as I think is common for most (whether with your family you’re born into or with the family you make).
This week was an orgiastic flurry of stirring and chopping and folding and sautéing and kneading and fraisage. A little bit French (pâtes, brisée & sucrée, one of each), a little bit Italian (ravioli in the style of my nonna’s mom, Nonnie B), a little bit American (3 recipes I took from the NYT foods section before I canceled my subscription in a fit over their publication of the Cotton op-ed), and even a little bit Somali (I would be remiss if I didn’t throw in a little plug for Hawa Hassan’s brilliant In Bibi’s Kitchen, which has energized my cooking over this month). There was even a little bit Chinese though it wasn’t done by me – maman made her mom’s (my popo’s) traditional day-after-Thanksgiving turkey jook (粥). I took pictures here and there, thinking to do some sort of post around technique that I always find frustratingly lacking in recipe blogs.
Dinner came together in fit of chaos, as it always does. Even with all the forethought in the world, we still run through the marathon of all the things having to get heated or cooked in the final hour. And though my parents’ kitchen is bigger and better equipped than either of my grandmas’ kitchens, the three of us were constantly on top of one another, vying for burners or ovens or even the microwave and trying to help each other stay moving. There were two last minute mishaps (exploding ravioli and these fussy potatoes where I just couldn’t get the butter to emulsify), and at one point I was caught muttering, “happy fucking Thanksgiving,” which thankfully sent us all into hysterics.
As I realized, sitting at the table by myself after the meal, I was cooking as much as anything to wrap myself in ritual and thumb my nose at the all loss all around me. It wasn’t a conscious decision to be incredibly extra about the holiday, but it was clearly all the angst of this oddest of years coming to the surface. I didn’t need to make two kinds of stuffing. I didn’t need to make two desserts with two different doughs. There were so many ways to simplify and streamline this process, and yet.
Most of us are not taught to grieve in any real way and there are some truths about grief that can’t be anticipated, only learned through experience. And when you take a year of such deep collective loss where there is no space given for commensurate public grief, it’s no wonder so many of us are struggling to cope in our own ways. Moving forward without going through the grieving process is not, in fact, moving forward – you’re just burying the problem, only to have it pop back up later, often times inconveniently and messily. We need time; we need patience with one another. We need patience with ourselves. And try though I might, you can’t just cheer it away, and relentless positivity is equally toxic to negativity.
I wish I had arrived at some sort of profound conclusion at the end of all this, but it, not unlike everything else, seems to be a work in progress. And that will do for now.
