A morning free and a pound of chopped meat.
I’ll make two days of food I think. Make a meatball batch and split it into two different dishes. I know it really needs a lot more meat than that but I figure I’ll stretch it.
Boil up a pot of tomato sauce and another pot with mushroom sauce. Add lots and lots of soaked challah to the meat two eggs and split the batch. One I throw into the tomato sauce the other into the mushrooms. Turn up the heat and the meatballs fall apart by the second.…
I decide to start a crepe batch thinking I’ll use the mushroom sauce over the crepes so at least there should be some results from the day. But then it starts to feel like those merry-go-rounds I’ve gone on so many times like when a child is having a problem and I explain to the teachers that the workload is too heavy and yet they try to push just a little further.
And just like those meatballs the child breaks.
After the child falls apart from being stretched too far I run around cooking up all kinds of ideas to put their little life back together doing all kinds of twists and turns to get the whole thing back to its original intention and somehow make it all palatable again.
Now I shake the pot gently still afraid to move anything around for fear of it falling apart altogether.
Totally frustrated I decide cooking is a waste of time and I’m not cooking anymore. I could have done eight other things in that time and just put a chicken in the oven. Why did I try to push something without having the proper materials?
It’s true there are some people in the world who can do a split without flinching reach their toes without groaning.
And there are those who can stretch a pound of chopped meat to feed 15 people.
Once there was this woman in the gym. She’d lie on one of the machines for half an hour without moving an inch.
Sometimes I thought for sure she was asleep till all of a sudden she’d lift herself up and moan “Oy.”
Then she’d lie back down for what seemed like another half hour and then lift herself up and say “Oy.”
I stopped going to the gym for one odd reason or another for about a year. Recently I went back and I saw her. She had lost over 60 pounds one “Oy” at a time.
I could have added less challah and why exactly did I need to make two meals out of one? Did I not have faith that tomorrow I’d have more meat and more time?
And why does a child need to be pushed till he breaks?
I know a mother who used to try keeping her young children up late so she wouldn’t be woken early the next day. You’d go to her home at 9 p.m. and the children looked so dizzy and tired. And they never even slept later in the morning. Recently someone shared a new theory that the earlier you put a child to sleep the longer he sleeps. It makes sense. The child is relaxed.
I wanted to make two batches of meatballs so I’d have more time the next day.
The teacher wants a child to learn more so he can learn more the next day.
The mother wants her child to sleep later so the mother can sleep later the next day.
I have a friend who calls at least once a day in a panic attack. She has good reason. She has many children and no means.
She’s lived in Israel for over 30 years. We always end the conversation with “You’ve lived here for over 30 years.” And she says “Right.” And I say “You’ve made it until now with food to eat and a roof over your head.” And she says “Right.”
It was one of our hardest tests in the desert that mahn fell one day at a time and we couldn’t save or store it.
Actually it went bad when we tried to make it stretch. —