Some cars, some gravy, it's all good on 38th Street

We spent most of the day downtown at Pride-related events, but we started the day off at National for the second Cars & Gravy event of the summer. Because we weren't there long, I have more pictures than words. But they're pretty good pictures...

If you have any appreciation for cars, and you're in the area next month, you should totally put this on your list of things to do. It might occupy you for less than an hour or you might find yourself there most of the morning. It runs 8 a.m. to noon.

Cars & Gravy is a neighborhood get-together for anyone who likes cars or gravy or is interested in what's going on inside the bank at 215 E. 38th Street. Vacant for years, the bank was renovated and is now offers community meeting space and will soon be the home of Neal Brown's newest restaurant.

The restaurant will be called Midtown All Day, and if you're lucky, the chef will be serving something yummy inside the building.

The car part of the event is a super casual - which makes it super fun - a potluck of vintage or unusual cars. People drive in with whatever they want to show off.

The gravy part is Old Major Market, a gourmet bacon maker who offers biscuits, gravy and a cup of Joe. That, too, is worth your drive.

And just for fun, there's a fresh-cut flowers vendor in a pretty truck with even prettier (and reasonably priced) flowers. You'll probably meet some new friends.

It's fun to march with the Y.M.C.A!

I think I've said this before, but Indy Pride is one of the most fabulous days of the year. And not because of all the glitter.

It's just a fun day. Everyone is so happy and there's just a ton of silly fun happening everywhere you look. This was our third time to get to walk in the parade -- thanks, Karin Ogden and the downtown YMCA team for letting us join in.

To your left are Ali and Jeff as we began to step off with the truck speakers blaring, what else? "YMCA." I don't know if their letters were off or my shutter wasn't up to par, but you can sort of see the letters if you squint.

Extra points if you sing the song while you scroll.

While we were there, Ali ran into her friend Roxie, who is involved with the local Rocky Horror Picture Show event. Ali got all excited about it and wanted to go.

Jeff, of course, dove right in and he and Ali started singing songs and gyrating in a manner that fit right in with the ambiance of the day.

"I have the soundtrack on one of my cassette tapes," he claimed. "It's Number 156, I think."

Sure enough, when we got home, he pulled it out and played it. It's a 1982 vintage and plays just as well now as it did back then.

You may recall that I am not a rock and roll scholar. In fact, at Pride, when the band played a short round of country music, I was the only one singing. Ali cringed.

But when they covered Shania, it was Ali who said, "Let's go girls.." And we had a  tiny duet.

Despite that, it seems I'm going to the Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight. I've been resting up since we got home.

Oh! Shades of Sugarland at the State Fair. We had just gotten out of the place and were in our car headed home when the tornado sirens blared and there was a temporary evacuation.

Since the Sugarland disaster in 2011, Indianapolis doesn't eff around anymore when storms are sighted. There had been a report of a funnel cloud north of the city. We were blessed with good timing, but a lot of folks were just getting in, a lot more were inside, and they all must have gotten soaked.

Our friend Jeph got stranded along the canal underneath West Street. It was en route to the Eiteljorg, which was the evacuation site . Once the rain ended, the festival resumed, but it was a bit of excitement.

Imagine all the glitter that got washed off in the rain. Sad. Then again, it was crazy hot so the rain might have felt good.  It's been dry for hours now, not that I'd know as I've been resting my delicate self.

I was a little surprised that Jeff agreed to this midnight movie request.




Ali leaves for a 10-day, 4-country European tour with school tomorrow. Jeff is wringing out every bit of time he/we can have with her before she goes. (I'm one to talk as she and I saw a movie -- "But I'm a Cheerleader" -- at Newfields last night. )

Also playing in her favor for tonight is the fact that Jeff knows every word, bump and grind of the soundtrack of Rocky Horror.

Ali thinks we'll need fishnets and eye-liner. I'm hoping she means for the two of us...

Used but Useful

We inherited a lot of stuff when we moved into our house, and I keep finding treasures like this fun little metal tray and a gazillion - give or take a zillion or two - nails, screws, bolts and washer preserved in old jelly jars.

We only met Emil Gelb a few times, but every time we find something useful, or something that makes us shake our heads, we think of him fondly. (Among the treasures he left that didn't make the "keep" pile was enough dry-cleaner plastic bags to stuff a mattress or six.)

Two of the best things were lawn chairs. The old kind with woven strips. We have decided they're at least 60 years old because they're super sturdy and don't fold. They went perfectly with the house until some of the webbing started to give way to age.

Our neighborhood had a yard sale and I found some things down the street that I thought my sisters would want. Our neighbors Don and Patty Holtz actually knew Mr. Gelb, the original owner of our house.

Don and Patty were giving away some lawn chairs of the same ilk as Mr. Gelb's but more modern. As Jeff and I argued over whether they needed to come live at our house - Jeff reminded me of our years-long plan to re-web the inherited chairs and I reminded him of the years-long part, which inspired Don. He had spare webbing that he was trying to get rid of.

So we spent most of Saturday afternoon fixing the chairs. It required only one trip to the hardware story and we didn't even get into an argument over how to do it. It was a major milestone in the Reed family joint home improvement projects.

We had enough good strips to keep one chair in its original form for a little while longer. The green and white one is a combination of Don's old webbing and a few new white strips we had to buy. You'll find us on the front porch in them for the rest of the summer toasting both the Gelbs and the Holtzes.

It's been an eventful couple of weeks. My niece, Rebecca Weir, has moved in for a little while as she takes a couple summer classes at Butler University. She'll be back in university housing in the fall, but for now, we're having a lot of fun with her her. Via Netflix, she and Ali are introducing me to Parks & Recreation, which I somehow missed the first time around.

They made French macaroons today. Becca was recovering from her Organic Chemistry test and Ali is working on a project for our neighbor, Kris, who's father passed away. If they keep this up, I may not make it through the summer without needing to buy new clothes.

 Last weekend, we spent some time at Queen Lynn Sinex's lake with John and Lisa Vielee. While it wasn't especially taxing, day drinking is apparently not a skill either Jeff or I have acquired.

Ali and her friend Nikki hit the water almost as soon as we go there. It was super fun and I woke up in time to come in 2nd in the pool for who would win the Indy 500.

We started off this weekend with a trip to Newfields, formerly known as the Indianapolis Museum of Art where we were going to watch "The Phildelphia Story" on the outdoor movie screen. Weather sent us inside, but it was still a lovely time with our friend Clay Miller.

It was a fitting prelude to our dive into restoring vintage chairs, although the movie is likely older than the chairs.Ali was a good sport hanging out with old people and even said she liked the movie, although if she had to choose between Katherine Hepburn and Clay's chicken salad, I think she'd choose the salad...

I may be turning into the Lupine Lady

It's a wonderful book, and if you have a little one, you should get it.

Back when Alison was small and we went home to visit our Maine family, she would make a beeline to the stack of books Grammie would have waiting in her bedroom. Some were stories Grammie had bought for Jeff, Jen and James. Others were more recent.

For several years, Ali's top three requests -- first to be read to her and later for her to read to someone or even to herself -- were The Color Kittens (A Little Golden Book), Leroy the Lobster and The Lupine Lady.

The Lupine Lady is about an old woman in Maine who, when she was a little girl, had told her sea captain grandfather that she wanted to be just like him: to travel the world and have adventures and then live beside the sea. He'd told her she could do all of that, but she had to do one more thing, as well.

 "There is one more thing you must do, you must do something to make the world more beautiful," the sea captain said.

Years later, she passes his admonition along to her young niece, who wants to be just like her.

The Lupine Lady, AKA Miss Rumphius, didn't do her last task right away, but once she'd begun, she kept at it. She scattered lupine seeds across Maine like Johnny Appleseed did with apple tree seeds across the Midwest. Which is how she earned her nickname, a reputation as possibly the craziest and oldest woman in the world, and credit for the  non-native flower's proliferation across The Pine Tree State.

Ali always teared up when we talked about how the lupines outlasted Miss Rumphius, but that she had left a beautiful legacy. We'd talk for a little while about what we would do to make the world more beautiful before the kittens, Blush and Hush, or Leroy and his friend, Crabby Crab, or other books caught her attention and we needed to check in with them.

All this to tell you that I came across some lupines for sale a week before Mothers' Day. I'd never seen them in Indiana, and I bought one. I suggested a couple more would be a nice gift for the holiday, thinking I might need more than one if I'm to get them to take hold.

Apparently I should have bought more when I was there because Jeff spent most of last Saturday scouring the flower and hardware stores across Hell's Half Acre for more. I didn't even ask him if he was checking for the elusive flowers at any craft beer or fancy liquor stores -- that's how good a wife I am...

Happily, he finally found some, and they're safely in the ground. They're tiny compared to the statuesque one I found, but we have all summer for the little ones to catch up.

I probably won't end my days living by the sea -- though I could totally be down for that. I haven't yet explored as much of the world as I want, but I have time for that, too. And I'd argue long and hard that by producing Ali, I have most definitely made the world more beautiful. Any other lasting, physical efforts will likely be in flower form.

The first lupine, a week before the irises bloomed.

 

In other news of late, Jeff and Ali and I took a walk around the neighborhood, something we haven't done as a trio in a while. We used to do it almost every evening in good weather. She brings a ball and we -- mostly her and Jeff -- play catch. I'm not as committed to the game as they are. And sometimes I carry wine.

They started their in-the-street game when Jeff had the crazy idea that she would love T-ball and he could help develop her arm. She didn't fall in love with T-ball but she did develop a decent arm. On this walk, we discovered a bucket in the middle of a street that marks a currently small sinkhole. It made a good target.

Alison, the T-baller.

If you look closely, you can see the yellow ball about to enter the sinkhole bucket. Let's  hope that thing doesn't spread...

Ali is much more dedicated to her baking/cooking craft than ball. She gifted me with jewelry and banana-walnut pancakes. It was a lovely day, made better with their company and the emergence of my irises, many of which came from my mother's yard. They seem to like  2018.

My mother's mother and one of her sisters were named Iris, so I like to see them bloom for a lot of reasons.

Side note: My Aunt Iris, for reasons unknown to me, had the nickname "Jiggy" and in any story about my mom's side of the family, usually had an "Aunt Jiggy" reference. Jeff has had a hearing issue for a long time, but it was only at her funeral, several years after he'd met her, that I discovered he had always thought we called her "Aunt Ziggy." (This may only be amusing to me, so skip this paragraph if you didn't giggle a little...)

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Blooms are awesome; roots are more important

Spring has apparently decided to do more than stick its head in the door, and my yard is awash with color. Thanks to my botanical strategery, we'll have splashes of yellow, purple, pink and magenta for next few weeks before a wave of orange and different shades of yellow displaces the early bloomers.

The flowers are a diversion from the mangy lawn that one day will get serious attention, which I'm sure my neighbors will appreciate. But that's another story.

Most of the plants I have on purpose in my yard are perennials -- phlox and daffodils, hostas, black-eyed-Susans and day lilies, flowering ground cover and lamb's ears, hens and chickens, grape hyacinth, iris, bee balm -- which pop up every year without me having to do anything to them. I should have a ton of tulips but the damn squirrels have ferreted out just about every bulb I've ever planted.

The magnolia that came with the house and its sister tree next door provide different shades of pink and if my lilac ever blooms, it should be a huge pop of purple in front and back. When it's all in full bloom, it's kind of awesome.

I'm a huge fan of perennials because the more serious upfront costs have an endless and amazing ROI. Annuals are fun bits of different colors and petal shapes to mix in, but they're one-and-done kind of plants. They don't dig their roots in deep. They don't keep coming back to enrich and beautify your life just when you need them most even when you've kind of forgotten about them.

Good friends are like perennials. They're rooted deep. They're there even when you can't see them, don't think about them. Even if your level of care and feeding would shrivel less-hardy stock.
 
One case in point: Debbie Ellis Lubelski. Back in high school, she and I went together like peas and carrots as Forrest Gump would say.

We were country kids, so we spent a ton of time outdoors with horses and dirt bikes. We tore up the back roads in her little red Chevette. We were going to go to Purdue University together, get our degrees and work for National Geographic. I'd write and she'd take stunning photographs. We were going to travel the world.

In reality, I didn't get to Purdue, but life worked out fine for this Sycamore. Deb, however, graduated from Purdue, where she met and married a great guy (hence the Lubelski portion of her name.) They have two sons, and they both work at Purdue in science-y jobs I can't describe. David works in a clean room where you can kill yourself with chemicals if you're not careful. Debbie oversaw greenhouses and is about to go back into lab work. They're super smart and probably have done things that have made your life better or safer.

Aaron has graduated and lives out-of-state doing important research. Adam is finishing a nursing degree at Purdue. Other than an occasional visit over the years, Deb and I have kept in touch largely via Facebook despite not living that far apart. But when I messaged her to say Ali was interested in Purdue and ask if she would have any time at all for a personal tour of the place, she didn't hesitate.

Deb didn't just give us a tour; she wore the hell out of us.

We'd had a great group tour earlier in the month, which gave Alison a glimpse of some of the labs. The Lubelski tour went from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. or so, and we were in and out of places I bet some students don't even see -- certainly not as high school juniors.

And while it had been years since we'd seen each other, it didn't seem like decades had whizzed past us once we re-united. The last time I'd seen David, we decided, was at their wedding.

I'd been to Deb's baby shower for Aaron, her oldest, but I'd not met Adam at all. But it didn't seem to be an issue.  He met us for lunch and then stuck around to show us places he haunts on campus - places he thought Ali might want to know about if she goes to Purdue. He and Ali took off a couple of times on their own, leaving the old folks to catch up and rest weary knees.

At one point, another student was taking us to some chemistry labs and Adam was peeling off to go study. I remarked about how amazing it was that he was so willing to take so much time to trot us around. Debbie thought I was talking about the female grad student who was ahead of a few steps with Alison. She quietly corrected me on my pronoun choice.

"I meant Adam," I said, which set us off into a laughing fit that made me remember a time her mom was driving us to an away basketball game and someone (it was probably Debbie) said, "I got gave a pig."

Debbie's dad was a pig farmer, so it makes sense that a porcine transaction would have been a topic of conversation. It makes sense that she would have said but I don't remember  the details. Just that the sentence's grammatical incorrectness made us explode in laughter that must have driven her mother to the edge of insanity. You probably had to be there to get the joke, but my stomach still aches from laughing about it.

Which brings me to my actual point. In my garden of friends, Debbie is a perennial. How many friends you haven't seen in decades would take a day off work to cart around you and your kid around a college campus? And bring along her husband and kid because it was long past time that you got to know them? And whose spouses you've barely met would make time for you like that? I hope you have some because they're awesome.


It was an amazing day. We had department heads, grad students, undergrads, scientists who took time out of their day to show us around. We saw mass spectrometry and electron microscopes being used, a mice lab where the woman running it showed Ali how to inject DNA into embryos that would be implanted in mice as part of her research into killing tumors.

Another lab was working on super secrete defense stuff. We were in a greenhouse with a guy who is trying to figure out how to keep e. coli out of our salad bowls. We were about done when someone mentioned electron microscopes and Deb said, "You want to see some?"

"Uh, yeah," Ali said as if it was crazy to think she wouldn't.

So we popped into another building where a woman thought for a second about who was doing what with the equipment in that area. She walked us back to an area where two guys were using one of the microscopes. These aren't the desk top microscopes you may remember from high school. They each have their own room and they kind of reminded me of a submarine periscope. They're huge and they give you an atomic-level view of whatever it is you're examining.
 
Our guide decided that the first viewpoint wasn't good enough, so she grabbed a tissue sample and gave Ali a closer look at it using a different electron microscope in a room across the way.

Ali geeked out and talked science with more people than we will remember. Many of them offered up their contact information if she wanted to stay in touch. On the way home, I said something to Ali about how fun it was for me to watch her talk science with these folks who are conducting what could be truly life-changing research.

"I was glad I could hold a conversation," she said. "It was super cool."

It was super cool, and made possible only because of the generosity of my old friend and the favors she and her husband called in from their network of friends at Purdue. So if their credentials aren't enough for you, there's that.
 
Oh. I said Deb wore the hell out of us. Here's my evidence. When we got back in the car to go home, Ali curled up and was dozing before we got off campus. I woke her up a few minutes later when I stopped to get gas and a Red Bull, without which neither the Mustang nor I would have made it home.

I'm fortunate to have met friends like Debbie everywhere I've been. The grape hyacinth in my yard came from my friend Cindy Athey's yard. Every year when it pops up, I think about her and wish we saw each other every day like we used to. I have peonies out back that my former neighbor wanted me to transfer so she can some visit them one day. My day lilies and irises are from back home.


The great thing about friends and perennial flowers is they don't have to always be in bloom to be part of your root system.

Bartlett pears, prom and a hint of pee

It was prom this weekend, and Alison went with her friend, Corie, and a bunch of other friends. They were hilarious, so pretty, and so ready to see the back of me.

They met at the Broad Ripple Steak & Shake and went in a caravan. I took a few shots before they invited me to go back home for a date night. The best part of the evening was when she got home from the dance. She was barefoot, of course, tired and smiling. I took her little tokens -- a light ball and a candle holder with Herron High School etched into it -- made sure she took care of her dress and went back to my room only to hear her shout for me from her bathroom.

"Mom!" she cried.

When kids are little, it's possible to get tired of hearing the constant request for attention. When they get into the teenage years, the tone changes, generally containing more notes of annoyance than need. When they're sixteen-going-on-seventeen, you're just grateful they're speaking to you. I ran into the bathroom to see what tragedy had happened.

She was standing there, her dress half-off, laughing. "Look!" she said. "I have glitter in my belly-button."

Sure enough there were remnants of the prom stuck to her skin. She's still my little girl...

She's still trying to get over her latest respiratory issue, and I was worried that she'd have a coughing fit at the prom. Like I did when I was a kid (and still sometimes) Ali coughs like an 87-year-old chronic smoker. It's startling if you've never experienced it. "I don't feel bad," she'll say between gasps. "I just sound bad."

She had a few episodes as we waited at BR Nails for her mani/pedi, which may or may not have contributed to people sidling away from her. We've been going there since she was little, and the owner glanced over at her when I told him it prom night. "Already?" he asked. "I remember when she was fourth or fifth grade."

Later, his brother or cousin heard her coughing and said he suffers with the same issue. He, too, has two inhalers and has tried a lot of things. He suggested having her drink tumeric powder dissolved into water. He said it was the best thing -- the only thing -- that had worked for him. We tried it when we got home and I might have overdone it. There was orange sediment in the bottom of the glass.

She had another bout a bit ago and I tried again. Less sediment, but then again I used a teacup...


In non-prom related matters, Alison spent K-8 at Christ the King, a small Indianapolis school whose sidewalks are bordered by ornamental Bartlett Pear trees. I can't remember when she started complaining about the smell that accompanies their spring blossom, but she hasn't stopped since.

So when I was driving to pick her up the other day and I was on Talbott Street, surrounded on either side by even larger specimens of the trees, I inhaled deeply. It was warmish and I had the top own and the heat on. I was proud that I kept on the right side of the street as I kind of choked up. Ali was right. They do stink.

So when I picked her up, I meant to take her up that street. Halfway home, I remembered that I'd forgotten and told her about it and showed her the picture I'd taken.

"They're pretty, but they smell like shit," she said, giving me the side-eye to see if I'd call her on her profanity.

"Actually," I said. "I think they smell like pee."

She looked at me. "Yeah? I don't get that."

We went back and forth a little bit about which elements we detected in the air before she looked over at me and said, "I love our little arguments."

Saturday morning we were walking to BR Nails to get her a mani/pedi for the prom, returning to the pear tree discussion.

"You know that when I said they smell like, you know, I didn't mean they smell like feces," she said. "I just meant they smell bad."

I said I'd known that, but remained committed to my literal description.

"It's not really urine, though," she said.

"Maybe not throughout, but it definitely finishes with a pee smell," I said.

It was there, on the 6100 block of Compton Street we realized our descriptions of the tree aroma was strikingly similar to how Jeff describes beer and wine. In deference to the Captain, I won't repeat the rest of our walking-home chatter.

One more prom shot.... this is what I woke up to this morning. It made me laugh because it's SO Alison. She wore those boots to school. Why, I couldn't tell you. It wasn't rainy. She just likes them. It's normally her Converse sneakers, sometimes combat boots (which she considered wearing with her dress to prom. Thank you Macy's customers and staff who talked her into the shoes) sometimes shiny sneakers or more delicate boots. But Friday, it was her Bean boots.

I love her so much. She is such a complex little creature and almost always comfortable in her own skin.  No matter the occasion.

OK. Maybe a few more...

Call me June Cleaver

I have never been -- will never be -- confused with a good cook. Give me a phone and I can order the best dinner this side of the Ohio River, but there aren't many people who've left my dinner table extolling my skills in front of the stove. Jeff gets all that love. I'm the default sous chef/clean-up crew.

In my defense, I've never killed anyone with my culinary attempts. (Jeff has come close a few times.) It's OK, though. I don't have to be great at everything. But there are those occasions when I wish I was better in the kitchen.

Jeff's out on a work trip, and Alison had decided we shouldn't be take-out queens in his absence. She even said she'd been thinking about planning a menu that would have her pitching in to cook. I looked at her funny and asked her to repeat herself. She's known as the Taco Queen for a reason, and she generally looks forward to Jeff's night away from dinner because I'm almost always down to order out.

"I want to make Mango Chicken Curry," she said. "Do we have fresh ginger?"

Here's what it's supposed to look like. Pretty, right?

I should have known things wouldn't work out as planned. Ali woke up Monday feeling bad, complaining of a sore throat and asking if she could come home early from school. She didn't want to miss Chemistry, but didn't think she was up for a full day of learning.

I agreed, and she spent the afternoon and most of the evening on the couch where she went through two boxes of Kleenex as she watched YouTube videos, did homework and picked up notes and assignments online. I glanced at the mangoes I'd bought for her and wondered if they'd make it into the saucepan.

She was feeling better by Tuesday and said she wanted the curry chicken for dinner.

"Do I have time for a bath?" she asked as she darted into her bathroom.

I'm sure what I offered was to prepare the ingredients so she could make the dish.

I sighed. "Mother up," I told myself.

The recipe said it would take 15 minutes to prep. The recipe lied.

I've been known to get halfway into a recipe only to discover I don't have an essential ingredient. This time I was going to be smarter and assemble all the ingredients ahead of time. I needed white vinegar, which was in the far corner of a tall pantry shelf.

In getting it, I knocked over a bottle of fancy olive oil that's infused with hot, red pepper. The fancy cork in the stupid fancy bottle popped out and I had olive oil and red pepper flakes all over the wider, lower shelf. My wasabi peas were safe in their clear plastic box, but the lid was covered in oil. It was everywhere, actually. Oil is good for wood, right?

I mopped up most of the oil and went back to assembling ingredients and reading the recipe.

I had to chop the onion, bell pepper, chicken and mangoes, and mince the garlic and the ginger. I considered that a while. I know what mincing is, but I thought we have a tool for that.

I'm not exactly sure what the tool I used was really for, but it didn't squeeze out little minces of ginger. It was more like a juicer. I ended up chopping the clump of root that emerged and threw the juice into it. I almost kissed the jar of minced garlic I found in the fridge. It was right beside the jar of minced ginger. (I might have cursed when I found that...)

Now for the produce. I debated the difference between "diced" and "chopped" for a while. God forbid I end up with wrong-sized chunks.

I Googled it. Turns out chopping is what my dicing usually turns into when I have to dice too much of something. So I chopped. It also turns out that mangoes are super slippery and have some sort of a fibrous core to them like a pineapple. I was pretty sure that I didn't keep the core. I learned that mangoes are sturdy enough to wash off just fine if they shoot off the cutting board and slide across the floor.

SIDE NOTE: Growing up, my family called green bell peppers "mangoes." Don't know why, but we did. FYI: mangoes are not green bell peppers. Not even close.

The recipe called for a red bell pepper. I had orange. Same thing, right?

I went back to the recipe. Step one was "Cook onions, bell pepper, garlic, ginger, spices.

We didn't have any vegetable oil and I'd spilled all the fricking olive oil.  Jeff is always yammering on about the right kind of oil and its smoke point or flame level or some such nonsense. I can never remember which one is right or the for what reason. But ha! I have a can of spray coconut oil. That counts, right? Mangoes and coconuts are both tropical. Close enough.

I sprayed the spray oil until it was near liquid in the pan and threw in the chopped onions and pepper, the minced ginger and garlic and the spices and went back to the recipe.

Crap! The recipe used grammar and tricked me. Step one had a colon. The stupid onions and peppers were supposed to be fried (I mean sauteed) first. Then, the garlic and ginger were to be added and stirred around a bit. The spices were to arrive fashionably late. Oh well. It all was in there and damn if I didn't need to spray the pan with oil again.

I added up the times I was supposed to cook in stages and let it all cook up, spraying here and there like a beauty pageant contestant with a can of Aqua Net.

Step two said to add the vinegar, coconut milk and one of the mangoes. Goddammit! I had chopped the stupid fruit and threw it all in the same bowl. I could estimate half, right? I mean, even I can divide by two. I threw it all in and got it to the simmering point.

I feel I should point out that I was well past the 15-minute point by now. My back hurt, I was working on a case of carpal tunnel, and I had oil in my hair.

It was then I read that I had puree the concoction once it was done simmering. Me, hot, spicy fruit and a blender. That's a recipe for disaster if ever there was one.

I kept telling myself to remember the lid, remember the lid: this stuff is h.o.t. I was glad Ali had the exhaust fan and her speakers on because I was literally talking myself (out loud) through the ordeal.

I remembered the lid. (Ha! You didn't think I would, did you? I totally had a Lucy Ricardo vision, but I worked hard against it.)

Even as I pulsed the blender, I was shaking my head. I don't puree things. Maybe a smoothie, but not a dinner entree. That's Jeff-Reed-level cooking. I so should have made Ali do this.

But, she was sickly, and when she or Jeff is in the kitchen, there's stuff dripping from the ceiling and all over the floor. I may not be a great cook, but I can clean the crap out of things. So far, (other than the oil) I hadn't destroyed the kitchen. I had, however, used up a ton of different vessels. Cleanup was going to take longer than the damn prep.

The puree was supposed to go right back into the pan, which seemed kind of like a cheat, but OK. I was to add the chicken and the mango and cook it for 10 minutes. I took a deep breath, surveyed all that I'd done so far and decided it wasn't a disaster. I tossed it all in and tackled the small mountain of dishes that had multiplied like litter on a post-Spring Break beach.

Crap! The mangoes weren't supposed to mingle with raw chicken. This recipe was not my friend. In its defense, the words were there. I just maybe skimmed a bit more than I should have.

I had to add two tablespoons of fat-free half-and-half because I'd bought light coconut milk, which according to the recipe was like using cardboard instead of lasagna noodles or something. It was a snarky editorial comment that I feel is not appropriate for recipe work, but who cares what I think?

The recipe actually called for heavy whipping cream, "if you "must" use light milk."

Let's get real here. If I bought light coconut milk and "must" use it, what are the chances that I have heavy whipping cream in the house? Right: zero.

Idiot recipe. I was supposed to use "slightly unripe on the firm side" mangoes, too, and be prepared to balance out the sweetness or not-sweetness depending on what level of ripe/firm I ended up with. I guess I could have Googled how to tell when a mango was ripe, but I was still laughing over calling green peppers mangoes. Who can Google when you're giggling?

There was a remedy for the mango state of existence that involved raisins or vinegar, but I decided to skip over that scenario entirely. Ali had -- thank GOD -- told me she didn't want raisins in it. We didn't have raisins anyway.

We also didn't have fresh cilantro to garnish the dish when it was done. It's Tuesday. Tuesday dinner doesn't deserve garnish. That's a weekend thing. A weekend when Jeff is manning the stove.

Anyway, I stir the stuff around and let it cook. Ali emerged from her bath as it reached the end of its suggested cook time. She peered into the saucepan. She'd been in the bath approximately six hours. (It was maybe less than that, but it seemed like a long time.)

"There's a lot of liquid in there," she remarked.

"Yeah, I may not have had exactly the right amount of chicken," I said.

The recipe called for 1-and-a-quarter pounds of chicken. I had two breasts leftover from a larger event. They were in an unmarked Ziplock freezer bag. I have no idea how many pounds it was. It had taken FOREVER to chop into bite-sized pieces and I'd had to trim off gross wads of fat. It looked like enough. I sure didn't want to thaw and chop more.

"Did you weigh it?" Ali-of-the-bath asked.

Uncle James got her a fancy kitchen scale for Christmas. It lives next to the blender, but I averted my eyes from it. I really didn't want to chop more chicken than I had to.

She tasted it and said it might be OK anyway. "I'm going to add frozen peas," she said.


Cool, I thought. Better peas than raisins. I microwaved some rice and she took her bowl to her sick couch.

"Hey Mom," she called. "Can you bring me more Kleenex?"

I walked into the room and directed her to the Kleenex behind her, within arm's reach.

"It's really good!" she said, snatching the box and grinning.

"It's really good," she repeated.


I snatched my phone and started taking pictures. She told me to stop taking pictures.

"It's not very often I do things right," I explained.

"You do things right," she said. "Just not in the kitchen."

She's lucky she's sick.