A passionate & fully-experienced life leads through winning, losing, & everything else

       
Here is what I was doing the day before my book,  Passionate Vegetarian,  won the James Beard Cookbook Award: moving furniture. Dust-busting. Toting vases, lamps, end tables, books, upstairs and downstairs.

This was in my mother’s house in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. My mother is 87. She broke her hip in January of this year, then re-fractured it in February during physical therapy (our family does not do things by halves). Her care has been an ongoing part of my life this year. She is currently in a rehab center, but her deepest desire was and is, of course, to return to her own home and live as independently as possible. 

Since January I have been working on that home, coming and going between Arkansas and New York, compressing the stuff of 50 years of her life and three stories to one story, because stairs are out of the question for the foreseeable future, and a live-in caregiver will need to reside upstairs. Her old living room has become a new bedroom (the bedroom used to be on the second floor), with a mini-office and desk corner (the office used to be on the third floor). Her old dining room became a living room (we lost the dining room; the kitchen is now eat-in). The bathroom down the hall became a bathroom off the new bedroom, with hand grips for accessibility, good lighting, and a really cool bathtub which has a door so you can step into it, and Jacuzzi jets. We repainted. We replaced old windows. We moved stuff down to the basement, up to the attic, located, replaced, rearranged, cleaned, and breathed in sheet rock dust. (Left: my mother, about ten years ago, in healthier times, standing in front of her beloved home).

The day before the Beard Award was more or less the last hurrah of the three months of this intensive renovation. I was doing it with a team of seven kind and stalwart people. There was my friend Deborah Krasner, who had come down from Vermont and who was also nominated for a Beard Award, for her fabulous book The Flavors of Olive Oil (cover, right; fuller review follows this essay) as well as Fran Manushkin, a children’s book writer who is a friend of my mother’s (and who was a young editor back in the days when my mother was head of the children’s book department at Harper & Row). In addition we had Vanya, a Dominican who had been a caregiver to my brother’s girlfriend’s late mother,  and her son Mackie; plus Christian LoPriore, a dreadlocked Italian, and his friend John, two 20-something musicians who lived in Hastings, and had been lined up by Rick Whalen, who lives across the street. We were quite the crew, and we worked pretty much to the point of exhaustion. But by the end of the day, the house looked better than we did.

Here is what
I did on the morning of
the day my book won the James Beard Cookbook Award...

"And lastly, thank you all, my colleagues. On this brief and unpredictable ride, in our lovely, bittersweet lives on this planet, those of us who work with food are privileged. We get to offer others nourishment and celebration, remind them of sensual pleasure, of each other, and of the fragile globe which gives us our food and of which we are part and which we all share, passionately.”
 

                                       ---- Crescent Dragonwagon, May 13, 2003