Happy Friday! (Good Things, November Edition)
Chestnut Hill on Friday evening. This is the view from my little desk set-up here in Philadelphia: a card table tucked against the gable window on the third floor, in Andrew’s childhood bedroom.
I had a funny thought yesterday, while walking around the neighborhood. We’re down in Philadelphia this week, visiting Andrew’s father, and we managed to time it so that we caught peak foliage in Chestnut Hill. (I’ve said it before, but this has been the most beautiful fall I can remember.) In the last few days, the leaves finally started dropping, and as I was taking my afternoon walk, the sight of the bare tree branches, combined with the gray skies and raw chill in the air, made me suddenly think: what month is it again? In the beginning of Covid, I was religious about getting outside for a daily afternoon walk, and because the visceral experience of a raw autumn day is really no different from that of a raw spring day, yesterday, before my rational brain could remind me that we’re in November, those bare trees made me feel like I had suddenly time-traveled back to the beginning, back to the strange days of March and April.
Except that, during yesterday’s walk, I was listening to the latest episode of The Daily, where they were talking about the Pfizer vaccine, and the idea that we’re one step closer (maybe! hopefully!) to a solution to this thing. In so many ways, my walk yesterday was identical to walks from the early part of the pandemic. Headphones, sneakers, jacket, mask, bare trees, cold air: those exterior details look exactly the same, because I guess they are exactly the same, and sometimes I have these moments of thinking, has anything changed? Have we made any progress? What does 2020 have to show for itself? But these moments are fleeting, because every day there are little reminders that there is progress, there is change, and even when the seasons conspire to confuse you, even when these shorter days and colder temperatures and second/third waves throw you right back into memories of March and April, it’s good to remember that we’re moving forward. That we can only move forward, even if it’s painstaking and gradual. That’s how time works! (I mean … I think. I stopped taking physics after tenth grade, so my grasp of relativity is pretty shaky.)
It’s been an odd week with everything going on, the bits of good news and dire news both, but there is also the rest of life, the part that has nothing to do with the news. And thank god for that. Here’s what I’ve been up to lately—tell me what’s going on with you!
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Cooking. During election week, I did a LOT of stress baking. Since then, my cadence has returned to normal, I’m no longer having to buy a pound of butter every time I go to the grocery store, but I’m continuing to find incredible joy in trying the recipes in Dessert Person, including the recipes that push me beyond my comfort zone. I’ve watched enough Great British Baking Show to know what rough puff pastry is, but I’d never actually made it myself, so earlier this week, I decided to tackle it for the first time. I’ve always been intimidated by pastry (I’m still scarred from a disastrous pie dough incident in 2009), and so I was paying hyper-attention to every little step in a very Type A way (Andrew, walking into the kitchen: “you seem stressed”), but…it worked! It worked beautifully. I made palmiers, aka elephant ears, pictured below. I felt unduly proud of them. I can’t wait to make them again. Maybe next time I will tackle, as they say on GBBS, “full puff.”
Watching. I’ve only seen the first two episodes, so I’m not quite caught up, but I’m loving The Undoing on HBO. I could watch infinite TV like this, creepy suspense plus socio-anthropological skewering of the Upper East Side, plus fabulous production values. (The Upper East Side is my home and I love it forever, but it is very ripe for skewering, which is, to me, part of the reason to love it.) Nicole Kidman is as excellent as you’d expect, but I think the most pitch-perfect character might be her best friend Sylvia, played by Lily Rabe. She just nails it. So good.
Reading. After reading this profile of John Banville, I decided to pick up a copy of his new book Snow. I’d never read Banville before, but this felt like an easy low-stakes way to try him out, and the story seemed seasonally appropriate. A murder mystery set in an old Irish country house is the exact thing to put me in a Christmas-y mood (haha, is that just me??). I finished it this morning, and I liked it, but it was one of those books that, at the beginning, I thought I would love, so mere liking is a bit of a letdown. But the writing is gorgeous, and if it’s not the most twisty or surprising mystery you’ll ever read, well, that actually made the story feel more real, and that real-ness actually made it more creepy.
Listening. The other week, when I was setting out for a run, I got the extremely random urge to listen to the old Jay-Z album, Magna Carta Holy Grail. I honestly don’t know why I’d gone so long without revisiting it. It took me right back to the halcyon days of 2013. Life was so simple back then! Put on a little “Tom Ford” or “BBC” and suddenly I am a twenty-something again, running on the treadmill at Equinox, and I am not wearing a mask, and Obama is still president, and everything is delightful! (A girl can dream!)
Maybe these palmiers aren’t quite as chic as the ones you buy in Paris, but hey, until I can actually get myself on a plane to France, they will do just fine!