Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Famnig Hjärta

Posted February 19, 2008
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Photo of Ben

Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

You know when you're doing a Van Gogh jigsaw puzzle, and your fingers are moving in a kind of regular finger-like way, fitting pieces here and there or organizing them into piles of iris and sky, but your brain has suddenly turned into a slot machine? And it's spinning around and around, cherries, lemons, dollars, barrels, coins spewing out, coins not spewing out, and you keep repeating crazy things aloud until your loved ones, who are just trying to get the ochre of the grass done before bed for goodness sake, finally say politely, "If you don't know any more of that song than the one line, could you please find something else to sing?" And you realize that you have crooned the words "I am aglow with thoughts of you" at 30-second intervals for, oh, the last 45 minutes?

Ben is having that - the slot-machine brain - only it's with the Ikea catalogue. "Our biggest idea is our smallest price!" he announces every 2 minutes, flipping glazedly through page after page of Norrgrund wall cabinets and Försiktig stools while I stir borscht at the stove. "We're crazy about low prices!" he announces, and I feel like I'm in the discount electronics commercial from my own childhood ("Crazy Eddie's. Our prices are in-sane. . .!" If you didn't grow up in 1970s New York, take my word for it: the whole thing was in-sane.)

"Oh my God!" Ben says from the kitchen couch, where he's curled up by the woodstove. "This Dudero paper lantern is a thousand dollars!" and I lean over to look. "Nine ninety-nine," I say, laughing. "Nine dollars and ninety-nine cents." And he says, "Phew! I mean, that was so not the smallest price for a paper lantern."

Our plan is to go to Ikea in a week or so to get a few things we'd like for the new house: bookcases and a cabinet, chairs, a rug. (If it's anything like our previous trips to Ikea, I will shop and shop and then, suddenly - standing in line with our cart full of boxes that will need to be not only paid for but also precariously bungeed to the top of the car and then screwed together at home in a medley of cursing and Swedish instructions - I will lose it and say, "Forget it. I can't stand this. Let's just skip all this stuff and go home." And I'll be sent out to wait in the car while Michael waits and pays like the rational person he is.) The kids are also planning to pick out a few things for their new rooms - bedside tables and lamps - and Ben is having his first experience of Catalogue Skiing, where you start at the top of the slope, clicking yourself sanely into the bindings of stuff you actually need, and before you know it you're whizzing down through page after obsessive page of things that are more and more bizarrely fascinating until you are on what can only be described as manic mountain.

But even as Ben's clearly unraveling ("Our biggest idea ...!"), I'm impressed at the way he's becoming such an arbiter of his own taste: "Striped wallpaper ..." he considers, then pronounces: "Too cluttery. But this I like - this chair with the leaves and the red cherries. It just works somehow, even though the pattern's kind of busy." He gets a kiss on the top of the head for that, my cabbagey hands up in the air, but I say, "Honey, do you maybe want to find something else to do for a little while? Maybe a book or a puzzle - or I could bring the drawing stuff in?" And he says, "Nah. This is good," and dives back in, adrift in vague longing.

Didn't you have it as a kid? My friend Jonathan just reminded me of the Sears Wish Book. I used to memorize the toy section (and - but let's never speak again of this - the underwear section), dog-earing page after page of things (Sno-cone maker) I would never get and didn't even truly want. I do it still: staring online at a 3-D tour of an Amtrak sleeper car; paging through the Williams-Sonoma catalogue, as if choosing the custard cups I would get if I were getting custard cups is my God-given duty.

And so it is pure hypocrisy when Ben says again, "We're crazy about low prices!" and I snatch the catalogue out of his hands and say sternly, "Take a break from Ikea. Go find something to do." I am instantly sorry. I picture Michael snatching Pottery Barn from my fingertips while I pick out imaginary Zen candle arrangements. Is this called projection? You know it's a waste of your own time, and so you're pissed at your kids when they do it too? I hate that - the way you expect you'll be most sympathetic with your children around the weaknesses you have in common, but then you're not. In fact, you're just irritated to be reminded of them - spitting some wordless version of "What's wrong with you?" at your own reflection. Ben, the gentlest person I know, left blinking and empty-handed, stung by the flung jellyfish of my disrespect.

"Looking at the Ikea catalogue is pretty much a victimless crime," Michael coaches gently, and so, later, I give it back. "I'm sorry," I say to Ben. And he looks up at me from the nearly-black depths of his eyes, shines up at me that crazy-beautiful smile with the single gigantic tooth in front, and says, "That's okay! I was getting kind of weird about it." Then he takes the catalogue from me, points to a cushion shaped like a red heart with wide-open arms, and says, "This. This is what I want."

 

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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