Back when I was dating my opposite, the racist homophobic conservative hunter J., I was a regular reader of Gourmet magazine. I would prepare special meals for J., smoked salmon ravioli, pissalidière crisscrossed with anchovies and dotted with bitter black olives, pears braced with crystalized ginger and honey and baked to a custardy finish. J. and I had chemistry, an easily bruised love, so we each tolerated the other's differences, limped along even though he lived in another town and had very real reasons to keep me at arm's length.

I remember preparing a meal for him in the decay of autumn, after the leaves had dropped from the trees and lay rotting in the gutter and the breeze was turning cold and harsh. I was just 21 years old and could focus on the kitchen, had the time to think about cooking, and it was all still new, too, love and cookery. There was a recipe in Gourmet for roasted fall vegetables. I skinned and hacked a heavy butternut squash, added knobby shallots, garlic, and chunks of red potato, then tossed the vegetables with olive oil and roasted them in the oven. Near the end of cooking, I added slivered sage leaves, the bitter scent of coming winter.

Sage takes well to butter and olive oil, get crisp and intense, medicinal over gnocchi, tucked among thick slices of potato. My husband and I grow sage in our front yard. The plant sits between the flat-leafed parsley and the lemon verbena, its silver green leaves upright, purple flowers still drawing honeybees. I’ll have to trim it soon, deadhead the flowers and clean off the spider webs in preparation for the feasts and sadness of fall.

Here is the original recipe, from Epicurious. Add 2 tablespoons slivered sage in the last ten minutes of cooking to recreate my more winter-scented dish.

Roasted Autumn Vegetables

1 1/2 pounds small red potatoes
1 pound shallots (about 24), peeled and trimmed
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 pounds butternut squash, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch pieces (about 4 cups)
fresh thyme sprigs for garnish, if desired

In a bowl, toss together the potatoes, quartered, the shallots, 4 tablespoons of
the oil, the bay leaf, the dried thyme, the garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. Spread the vegetables in an oiled large roasting pan and roast them in the middle of a preheated 375°F. oven, shaking the pan every 5 to 10 minutes, for 25 minutes. In a bowl toss the squash with the remaining 1 tablespoon oil and salt and pepper to taste and add it to the pan. Roast the vegetables, shaking the pan occasionally, for 10 to 20 minutes more, or until they are tender. Discard the bay leaf and garnish the vegetables with the thyme sprigs.

Gourmet
October 1990

Image: Attractive sage bush, much nicer than ours, from eHow.

Tags: boyfriends, recipes, sage, DC, College, Gourmet Magazine, Roasted Autumn Vegetables, fall, autumn, cooking

Image from Hope4Survivors

You want instant writer's block?

Try to write about your own shame.

That's not how today started. I wanted to write a story about a boyfriend I had in college, the tale of my second long term relationship. Our innocent beginnings. He was a teller in my bank, we shared smiles and pleasantries. Then one evening, when I was leaving the local watering hole with one of my male floozies, J approached me and said “I know you’re leaving with this guy, but can I call you sometime?” I gave him my number.

There was the little detail of my real boyfriend and our slowly dying couplehood. I had to put that out of its misery. It wasn’t a clean death. And when J went on a white water rafting trip with his family a month into our serious dating, I might have had a bar hookup or two. In between his return and our demise, we shared a period of sweet intense love. I loved him. I really did.

I was kind of crazy then. Angry. Pathologically needy. J was sarcastic and cruel, bitingly funny with a mean streak brought on by his quietly twisted childhood. After six months of total absorption, our relationship stalled and then limped along for another two years, with sporadic weekend visits (the margarita-inspired sex in a sprawling azalea near the Capitol grounds; the drunken knock on my door after a Redskins Super Bowl victory; my leap into the pool with the band, fully clothed, after I secretly followed J and Frieda back to his bedroom). I had a few mini-boyfriends on the sly, including one fellow philosophy major who totally trampled my heart and a graduate student who was a Jew posing as an Italian-American. Nervous about how he would be perceived in a Catholic-tinged philosophy program, the graduate student exploited his olive-toned skin and love of opera to go undercover, lived an odd temporary lie.

Still, J and I continued in our half-love without discussing the side relationships. The week I headed for graduate school, he left me a message, sang “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane,” to my answering machine, funny and bittersweet as ever. In November of that year, 1992, I found out that he’d gotten a new, serious girlfriend. After a tearful, confessional conversation, I mailed him a copy of the credit card receipt for my abortion. I’d been holding on to it for five months, waiting for the right moment to tell him.

Shame.

Ashamed of who I was and what I did. Ashamed of the abortion – the abortion. You think you can wash away shame or pain by showing it to the world, or to a limited subset of the sympathetic. Sorry, my good religious friends, my lovers of life. I let one baby happen by accident and took care of the next by violence.

By the end of my first semester in library school, I was in crisis, totally falling apart. Enter my first real attempt at therapy and my future first husband, the slow process of life rebuilding. If you are reading this, thank you future first husband, future ex-husband, for being so totally solid. I don't think I've given you enough credit for that. There is absolution in unconditional love.

I am starting to sift through the decade after the stillbirth, shining light on a dark time, preparing myself to come clean. I have wondered if the blog, my self-made public confessional, is the best way to expurgate shame. Wouldn't it be simpler to say nothing at all? Maybe finally get around to locating another trusted therapist, go the traditional recovery route? Or, if I must expose the ugliness, couldn't I just make it quick, compile a list, invite brief flagellation or accolades for my honesty and then move quickly on to self-forgiveness?

No, no, I have to transform the shame into a narrative, examine it inside and out. I need to dust if off, shine it up, put it in the shop window. Later, I'll pass it along to my fictional characters. They are waiting backstage, eager to take on the burden, ready to be set into motion. But before all that, before I can pass the torch in good conscience, I'll occasionally be picking apart my mistakes here, aiming for tricky self-forgiveness.

I hope you can stay with me for the ride, can keep an open mind and an empathetic heart. Oh, the places we’ll go!

Tags: shame, guilt, the stillbirth, secrets, College, boyfriends, love, emotional striptease