The most profound statement I ever heard Tim Allen say was
this:
“We found the one woman in the country who actually enjoys
cooking and cleaning, and we threw her ass in jail!?” He was speaking, of course, of Martha
Stewart. Like the woman that the
Pharisees “caught in the very act of adultery” and dragged before Christ to be
judged (they thought), we realize with very little astuteness that a man also
HAD TO BE INVOLVED. So why not more
about the man? In fact, since that
culture considered men higher life forms, why not just punish the man?! I mean if he was smarter, then he should have
been more morally responsible, right?!
I want to admit that despite her detour into the shady world
of insider trading and time in Sing-Sing or wherever it was, I really respect
Martha Stewart. I think, I hope, she is
an example of “do what you love, the money will follow.” Meaning, I hope she loves what she is doing
because she is doing it so fabulously. I
can barely clean the one house I live in!
And I don’t get paid to tell people how to clean or what to plant
when.
I subscribed to her magazine for a year and then stopped
because I just never found enough time to read it cover-to-cover as it
deserves. Even when she was otherwise
occupied behind bars, the magazine kept being generated with the same
impeccable quality I had come to appreciate.
Quite mysteriously last year, the previously expired subscription
re-appeared. So now I have a bunch of
reading to catch up on. It will be a
good vacation or rainy-day-read when I am not cleaning up the debris that the
new puppy is making in my house, around my house, and in my life in
general. (A debris that I feel
privileged to clean up after because the sun, in fact, does rise and set around
that little dog. Someday the AKC will
agree with me… even though he does have a tail.)
May I please take this opportunity to poke fun at one thing
in the magazine, though: Martha’s
schedule. Initially I counted it a
privileged revelation that she let us in on what some pieces of her real life
looks like. It was the same kind of
privilege, I reckoned, that was bestowed on me when Ciocci Helen gave me the
recipe for her Polish Easter Babka (bread).
Ciocci had not given the recipe to anyone
else because I practically promised my first born to her in order to get
it. Then I made the bread and found out
what a tremendous amount of work went into it.
I understood why she didn’t just photocopy the recipe and pass it
around: she wanted you to “get it” that
it was a thoughtful labor of love that literally took ALL DAY to
manufacture.
That is where the similarity to Martha’s Stewart’s personal
schedule dissipates. I am not sure that
Martha is working as hard on her schedule as I am on MINE! Martha may have two or three great estates
worthy of being airlifted and put on a hill in Glocca Moira or Wales, but she
also has a support staff to help her out. Let me run the contrast portrait for your
entertainment: we have been a total
flood zone in Central New York for the past month. Not “flood” like New Orleans. Just “flood” like- um, let’s go see if we’ve
got water in the basement, or if all the sump pumps on the shelf are ready to
go just in case. “Flood” like, do I want
to take that country road at night and risk it might not actually still be dry
to pass? “Flood” like, why is there an
entire flock of Canada geese standing around in my backyard having breakfast
and SWIMMING on my grass? You get the
picture. So the other day after work, I
put on my work jeans and climbed up on a ladder to unplug the top of the corner
gutter with a gardening claw. I did not
need Martha’s schedule to remind me to clean the gutter: I knew it was plugged because the water,
instead of draining down, was spurting up over the top. I just managed to snag a few leaves with the
claw. Water surged up into the 40 degree air, splashing my face, going down the
front of my jacket inside-and-out, soaking my jeans and wetting parts of my
shirt. It was too cold to even use
profanity. My job was just to hang onto
the ladder until I heard the slosh of the water re-routing itself downward and guzzling through the
appropriate pipe. I am wondering if
these are Martha-moments, or her staff gets to do them?
It was curious to me, for instance, that only once in the
month did she list: groom the
horses. Um, I’m no equine genius but I
think the horses need a brush-out on a fairly regular basis. I horseback ride once every decade and expect
that when I jump astride the horse, someone
else has been putting the time in on a regular basis to groom, ride and
train this horse so there are no “negative events” when I go out for a trail
ride. One of my dearest friends had a
horse that she was crazy about but kind of got distracted with other things and
didn’t see him as often as she had hoped.
He was up there at the farm doing what horses do all day: eating, hanging around, making piles, winking
at the girl horses and living off the land.
We went up to visit him and put him on cross ties in the barn to prepare
to groom him. She walked around front to
give him a kiss on the forehead and apparently he held some deep grudge against
her for the life of Reilly he was living because he bowed his enormous head
downward…. and then rammed it up into her chest. If that was me, he would have knocked me on
my keister. Has Martha had any of those
moments? Or does she shield us, the
innocents, from the raw negatives of her life?
I love her birthday reminders on her schedule. I have those on mine too. Except they don’t remind me of anything until
after I have failed: I fail to buy the
card. I fail to mail it on time. I fail to order the present on Amazon early
enough so that it makes it. I fail to
bake the cake the day before because I have a meeting of some sort (church, veterinarian,
grocery shop, etc.). Really, I owe one
big THANK YOU to anyone that I am supposed to get a birthday card to because I’ve
missed everybody’s birthday, including Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparents’
Day, Bosses’ Day, and all my dogs’ birthdays at least once and no one reams me
about it anymore. I guess I have to have
at least one fault, right?
It is easy to see that Martha has got the organization thing
down to a science. Yet, so do I… except
I can’t always execute the plan. She has
it written on one particular day in the fall “plant bulbs.” Where I live, either it rained that day or
some other priority of the urgent trumped my original plan. I have an apple tree that bears apples once
every two or three years. When those
apples “come in,” boy, do they ever! I
am making apple butter it seems for two weeks straight with every free moment I
have and often late into the night… only to have two of my critics say, “we
don’t eat a lot of butter because of our cholesterol.” I had to educate them that there is NO
cholesterol – or butter, for that matter – in apple butter. Another commented, “this should be less spicy,”
to which I replied: “um, that would be
apple SAUCE. The point of apple butter
is to spice up your toast or your roast!”
Bottom line, when the apples come in, there’s not a free second to be
popping bulbs into the ground hoping for a spring showing. You just wait for Spring, and try to trick
mother nature by putting the bulbs in as soon as the ground yields enough to
let you. Then you wait. And you watch for the squirrels.
I am surprised Martha doesn’t write more about
“waiting.” Waiting is an essential part
of gardening, cooking, and living off the land.
Even raising dogs – as I do – requires an inordinate amount of time
waiting. One of my dogs made me wait
over a year before she was “in season” to breed. Then the weekend of the puppies’ anticipated
births, I thought I would outright perish with all the waiting. I am a big reader, and was way too stressed
to read. I could just walk around and
pace, like expectant fathers used to do in the hospital baby-delivery
lounges. The dog kept going in and out
of the house. Then once outside it
seemed she couldn’t do what she wanted to do.
And then I got it. She
thought the pressure meant that she had to eliminate. She didn’t realize – and neither did I – that
the pressure at that very moment would bring forth Puppy #1 on the back lawn …
well, it would have, if I didn’t pop his forehead back in and walk her into our
cellar quickly and then encourage her to
push her firstborn son out into my waiting palms in the warmth of our home. Yes.
He was worth the wait – and he is the one that we kept. His official name is: Prince Valor of Morning Glory Acres. This year I have to plant the morning
glories. It wasn’t on Martha’s calendar
to remind me, so I guess I’m on my own.
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