the meal deal

Well, maybe it’s time for the schedule of work to click in. Summer’s great, but is it possible that we’ve become too relaxed about life?






Our eating habits are unraveling. There is still a phony regularity to the enterprise: we have breakfast together on the porch, but oftentimes, Ed’ll pass on breakfast eating. He'll munch on a blueberry and we'll idle through the next half hour watching butterflies. And lunch? It comes late. After we put in hours of work. We’ll go to the café, say at around 4, I'll bring my own sandwich. No one makes PB and J as well as I do.

But the really big issue is dinner.

It's evening. I get up to start dinner prep. Ed gets up to help himself to five portions of watermelon. I lose my desire to cook anything at all since within minutes he’ll say – I’m stuffed. What a surprise. And so I downgrade the effort. I do, for example, this:





True, they’re garden tomatoes and it’s market corn and the Trader Joe’s smoked salmon has omega this and thats, but still, it’s not what I call a solid dinner. It’s not warm, for one thing. That’s summertime for you – you throw things together from the fridge and pretend you have a meal.

Come next week, free time will be very very precious again. The weather will deteriorate, the butterflies will be gone. To Mexico maybe. Lackadaisical habits will disappear. And invariably, I’ll work harder at putting together more focused dinners. Which will be a good thing.