. Spinning .

I didn’t really feel up to writing much today, especially about today, but I feel much better now and can almost laugh about it. There’s so much to carry around in your head sometimes, and it’s always the most depressing that tend to keep rising to the focus of the inner eye of the mind.

As I walked into my father’s house, I found him in the middle of cleaning up the kitchen. He had, he explained, wanted to bake for me a frozen coconut-custard pie because he knew it was my favorite, and my sister had just brought him several Mrs. Smith’s. He hadn’t read the directions (printed on the bottom with no mention on the top or sides) which stated that it goes directly from the freezer to a preheated oven set at 425 degrees. He’d let it thaw on a refrigerator shelf. When he took it out to bake it, it was of course liquid in a raw pie shell in a flimsy tin pieplate and soft cardboard box. I found the box and empty pie shell in the sink, drained the soggy mess to throw away and washed the sink as he still swept tiny bits of coconut off the wooden kitchen floor.

It frightens him as well as me and we try to tell ourselves that this could happen to just about anyone, just as he couldn’t understand the new fuse box for the washer and dryer to replace the screw-type fuses that an electrician put in last week and told my father not to shut off just as my sister did twice more since as well. Per her suggestion, I black-lettered ON and OFF on white strips taped to the switches, and in the middle of my second warning not to shut them off, he does. This is my father, clever, curious and self-taught correctly in just about anything mechanical. We look directly in each other’s eyes as we talk and never say it. But the fear of the Alzheimer’s that we lived through with my mother is always there as a terrifying thought.

Among the many other things I did today instead of blog–like put in seven hours in the shop, finalize a paper, and tidy up the house a bit–was to prepare an impromptu meal for friends and spend a relaxed few hours in sharing food and laughter. Not many people can pull jumbo shrimp from their freezer as I can, but one of my specialties is stuffed shrimp, with a clam, crabmeat, mushroom, onion and garlic stuffing that leaves little room for breadcrumbs. Baked acorn squash, potatoes, salad and an apple pie and of course, my homemade wine from ’98 (an excellent year) was good enough for this informal get-together but the real delight was suggested by my husband and finished off the evening with a flair; the pomegranate was broken into, its leathery skin peeled back to reveal sparkling rubies of kernelled fruit. Broken only into halves, one for each side of the table, we shared in a most primitive manner the separation of the sections and the eating of the tart and juicy fruit.

And the feeling, as in reading an extraordinary author’s work, was simply a contented wow.

So after J. comes home from work looking adorable as he shyly hands me my Friday night rose, he kisses me hello and sniffs the air. “What’s for supper?” he inquires. “Turkey Pot Pie,” I reply. It’s not near done, and I feel badly when I find him still sitting at the kitchen table, knife and fork in hand a half hour later. But soon we are both sated, him with dinner, me with knowledge. With an apple pie on Monday, a whole Turkey Wednesday night, and the pot pie just devoured, I know I’m not a failure as a woman.