Wednesday Dinner

Back when Stewart and I were first dating, I lived in Santa Monica with two roommates. Yeah, Google Santa Monica and you’ll see a beautiful town on the coast, famous for its pier and shopping areas and trillion dollar houses (adjusted for inflation). Sadly, though, we lived in an alley behind a grocery store. The view from my bedroom window was of another building, and the view from our front window was a lovely vista of “under the stairs.” It was gorgeous. But it was awesome to live 10 blocks from the beach. I can’t count how many times I biked, roller-bladed, or walked there. I don’t miss Santa Monica with its tourists and choked side streets and lack of parking, but I do miss living by the beach.

That is not the point of this story at all. Forgive the rambling digression. I have my little earbuds in with the iTunes Genius playing music for me at top volume to drown out the sound of Paul Sr. shouting at Paul Jr. from the television, and when the songs change I tend to get off track.

Stewart was teaching a lot of night classes at the time, and he lived here in Northridge, which meant that seeing each other during the week was inconvenient, so we eventually settled on him coming to visit me on Wednesday nights, since he would be going against the flow of traffic in the morning. He didn’t arrive at my apartment until almost 11pm, and he would be hungry, so I would make him dinner. With that late arrival, I had hours to do other things and prepare the meal, so after a while I would create elaborate dinners with dessert and appetizers, with exotic ingredients (like garbanzo beans! and tuna!) that went beyond Hamburger Helper or Kraft macaroni and cheese.

I got really good at cooking up delicious meals that looked as good as they tasted. I even considered putting together a Wednesday Dinner Cookbook. Each week I planned the meal based on my mood – if I was PMS-ing it turned out as a heavy pasta dish with lots of cheese. If I was feeling energetic the cooking process would include lots of chopping. I wish I could remember any of the actual dishes but the years of serving only white or artificially-colored food to Kyle have erased any memory of grown-up or intricate or remotely gourmet dishes.

I don’t remember the meals we had once I moved into Stewart’s house, either. By then I worked long hours at E! and didn’t get home until after 9pm most nights because I would take exercises classes to avoid the evil evening traffic snafu that threatened to turn me into a horrible person.

(I interrupt this to tell you that iTunes genius is playing “Bust a Move.”)

Okay so that song change makes me shift gears again so that I can tell you my point. Last night my dear friend S. came over after work with her 2-year-old son D. I made some Campbell’s Soup one-pot recipe (which oddly took up lots of pots, but whatever) and we corraled all of the children into seats at the table and for at least 10 good minutes all adults and children sat there and ate and talked and enjoyed each other’s company. Also, there was wine.

S. and D. have come over like that on random Wednesdays for several months now, and the pattern reminds me of the Wednesday Dinners of yore. The only things that the two eras have in common are the day of the week, the fact that I make dinner, and Stewart. The location is different, a lot more (little) people are involved, and the meals are decidedly less sophisticated, but the whole point is time spent together. It doesn’t matter that the next day the house is destroyed and to get to my computer I had to walk gingerly to avoid crushing a toy or a piece of food (What? You think I should clean that up? There’s blogging to do, people!). If I’ve learned anything from 2009 so far, it’s that I should appreciate the people in my life while I can. The packaging isn’t what’s important.

(As if to mock/reassure me, iTunes now plays “Slipping Through My Fingers” by Abba, as performed by Meryl Streep. That is why they call it the iTunes Genius.)

(And now it’s Prodigy, which makes me want to go running.)

(The end.)