Who's Steve Kindel?

I'll admit it: one reason I remember Elsie so fondly and so often—just one reason—is that she gave me a cake recipe that I make about once a month. I'm a terrible cook, but this cake comes out perfectly every time. In fact, when I tell people I'm a terrible cook, if they've had this cake, they think I'm guilty of false modesty. Elsie was nothing if not generous, so I know she wouldn't mind if I spread the sweetness. Here it is, in her own words:

Elsie's Apple Cake, by way of Steve Kindel

1 cup of oil

1 1/2 cups of sugar—I mix brown and white sugar

3 eggs

3 cups flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp vanilla

3 cups of peeled, sliced apples—I use Rome, Delicious or McIntosh

1 cup chopped walnuts

1 cup raisins

Beat the oil and sugar together; add eggs, beat until creamy.

Add the vanilla.

Sift together the flour, salt, cinnamon and baking soda.

Stir thse dry ingredients into the batter

Add the raisins, nuts and apples.

The batter will be quite stiff.

Spoon batter into a buttered, floured angel's food or bundt pan.

Bake at 350 degrees for an hour or so.

Farewell, Elsie B

The other day I found out I'd lost an old friend. Elsie B. Washington died at the age of 66 of cancer and multiple sclerosis. I hadn't seen her since she moved to Oakland nearly 20 years ago, though I often tried to track her down when I was in the Bay Area visiting the 'rents. None of our mutual friends seemed to know what had happened to her. Turns out she'd been living in Yonkers, just a few miles from my apartment in New York, for a while before she died. Wish I'd known.

Years ago, Elsie and I and a couple of male colleagues used to have lunch once a month at a Japanese place across the street from work and pool our money to buy lottery tickets. It was Elsie's idea and an example of her foremost characteristic—optimism. And sometimes—rarely—we won, usually about $10 a person. The financial stakes and winnings were negligible. The fact that Elsie had selected us to share her luck was the real piece of good fortune for me.

A white woman with a child and a couple of married white men, all of us from expensive private colleges—we might seem to have had little in common with a single black woman from the Bronx. And we didn't. Elsie was by far the most accomplished of us. She was a gifted writer who wrote a couple of nonfiction books, one on sickle-cell anemia, another on relationships between black men and black women. Perhaps most famously, she held the distinction of writing the first black bodice ripper—Entwined Destinies—under the pseudonym Rosalind Welles. She's probably the only one of us who will merit an obit in the Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/arts/17washington.html).

Growing up in white secular suburban California, I hadn't had a lot of friends like Elsie before. I was quietly (I hope) fascinated by her blackness and her urban, Baptist upbringing.

When I look back, though, it wasn't her accomplishments or her race that made me treasure my friendship with Elsie. It was the example she set of not getting bogged down. I know she faced difficulties in her life, but she just didn't dwell on them. Grueling work assignments, crappy cubicle with migraine-inducing fluorescent lighting, cranky editors, the daily humiliations of being a grunt in a status-conscious company—she seemed to know where these annoyances belonged in the hierarchy of importance: beneath her notice. She had perspective. I think of her as having her eyes on the horizon, not in the sense of ambition but in the sense of taking the long view.

Alas, the long view, in Elsie's case, wasn't long enough. Sixty-six years old. 

Really silly post

I'm sure I'm not the only person who mulls over bizarre trivial questions. At the risk of mortification, I'll share some of mine:

In our house the litter box is right next to the toilet. As my cats and I companionably hunker down together, I am aware that people sometimes train their cats to use the toilet. It makes me wonder whether I could use the litter box. Jonny Cat Maximum is pretty good stuff, though the whole pellets-between-the-toes thing might get old fast. I'm a good squatter. Yogis say squatting is much more effective for elimination ...

Where does a penis go when a man crosses his legs? Does it go under or between his legs? And if so, doesn't it hurt? I've had penis pity since I was a child. It seems dangerous to have this soft protrusion that could get slammed in doors. If I were a man I'd wear a jockstrap full time.

Very young women apparently are capable of falling in love with very old men. (I'm trying not to be cynical here.) Is it possible for a very young man to fall genuinely in love with a very old woman? Or, say, a youngish man with an oldish woman? I've seen Harold and Maude, but does it ever happen in real life? I personally don't have anyone in mind—really.

Is there some particular feature that causes women but not men to be perceived as unattractive as they age? I've heard it said that women become more like men as they get older, so maybe it's the disjunction between our gender and our appearance that is off-putting. Maybe older women should start cross-dressing to preserve their appeal?

There, I feel better now. But you probably feel worse!

Trivializing cancer

Something has been bothering me for a few weeks now. It was reported to me that a certain science editor in declining to run a particular cancer-breakthrough story explained that cancer is no longer interesting because it has been turned from a terminal disease into a chronic one. I don't know if the person who told me this was an accurate reporter, but the notion that cancer is a chronic disease and that that means it's no biggy bugs me. First of all, it's the lucky ones who get the chronic forms of the disease. Second, the chronic form predictably leads to an early death, which means it's still a terminal disease. Third, living with a chronic disease means a life of chemotherapy, radiation, scans and scares. You try living like that.

Puja on my deck

Having a spacious deck in cramped New York is a wonderful thing. Of course, as with any other blessing, there are mitigations: used condoms, bloody syringes, pigeon poop, cigarette butts—the flotsam and jetsam of urban life—that descend from on high. This morning I awoke to find the planks littered with a new debris: lovely, pearl-white rose petals.

The thing is, we don't own any rose bushes.

Adventure in dreamland

In real life, I haven't owned a car for 35 years (my last car was a Dodge Dart with a vanity plate that read OBJET—get it?). But last night I was driving my SUV with a carload of my daughter C's friends, when a wild snapping rodent began racing frantically around the vehicle. Somehow I caught it. I identified it as a badger, though it was more like a ferret in its proportions and had ratty, fox-red fur and a long, flat, needle-toothed snout. It kept getting away, and I had to keep catching it amid the shrieking of the girls and the snapping of its sharp yellow teeth. (I seemed to be both driver and passenger, so miraculously navigation was not at issue.) My arms were scratched and bleeding, and thoughts of rabies flickered through my mind, but I was too busy trying to capture the little biter to dwell on the danger to me. Finally, we got it home to our apartment, and someone managed to stuff it into a large pickup-sticks tube and put the cap on it. Meanwhile I poked through cupboards to find some nonprescription catfood it might like (my cats eat a special prescription food that smells nasty). I never managed to feed it, but did give it some water with a syringe. Eventually we all piled back into the SUV, taking the crazed little beast with us, and let it go in a vacant lot that we realized with a twinge was about to be razed for construction.

Now normally I wouldn't try to remember a dream. After all, I have many every night. But this was a particularly vivid one. And I've been watching Season 1 of In Treatment. And then, there are these odd little bite marks on my shins this morning ...

Living in a world of pain

I'm living in a world of pain. It's not my pain. It's everyone else's. My friend B returned yesterday from the funeral of a cousin who died in his 40s of cancer and heads off tomorrow to escort her sister home from the hospital where she's undergone electroshock therapy for depression. My friend R is standing vigil over her 96-year-old mother, who has such severe osteoporosis that she broke her leg turning over in her sleep. Her leg has been set, but now a mass has been discovered in her innards. Meanwhile, R and her husband are separating after 25 years of marriage, the loft they've shared must be vacated, and she must find a new, cheap apartment for herself and at least one of her two dogs. Then there's my friend T, who is requesting a retirement package from work so that she can devote more time to providing hospice for her aged father. And let's not forget my other friend B, who at age 65 lost her job—at the company she helped found!—and hasn't been able to find another one.

I wish I knew how to comfort these dear friends, all of whom took care of me during my cancer ordeal. I know I'm supposed to listen, to bear witness. I don't really know how to do that. I mean, I do listen, and I do observe, but how to I make that into a comforting experience for my friends? And isn't there something else I can do?