Never Walked In High Heels

By the time I put her on the plane, I had no idea how I was going to survive without my friend. A s.n.a.f.u at immigration put a friend who came to visit me on holiday back in the US for another six weeks. Thus all my plans for companionship, a friend to lend an extra hand, and not having to come home to an empty house, were thwarted.

At the same time, my long time assistant was moving out, leaving me very little time to find someone new to cook, clean, feed me my meals, and help with other minor but much needed tasks. Then, in a moment of divine irony, an email came through my inbox with the subject heading “What feeds you?” The gods were laughing.

The most difficult thing about my disability is that, even well into adulthood, I cannot make a meal or feed it to myself. All other aspects of life in a wheelchair I’ve just about been able to wrap my head around. I wear shoes which I never have to tie, I get my hair washed by a salon, I’m even quite good at flirting in pubs so I can get guys to help me walk down the stairs to visit the toilets. But all of this requires calories to burn, which in turn requires the intake of food, which is one area of my life that I have zero control over. Having to depend on others for food is like a country having to depend on OPEC for energy, sooner or later everyone else has you over a barrel.

I once heard a homeless woman being interviewed remark that the hardest thing about being in her position was not knowing where her next meal was coming from. Although I am far from being homeless, I know exactly how terrifying that feels. It is a kind of poverty which is not dictated by the wallet or by some stockpile of faith. At least three times a week there comes a point where I have no idea when or how I’m going to eat again and unless I’m willing to put some pieces together, I have no idea how that can possibly change. My last meal could quite possibly be exactly what it sounds like.

There’s about as many differing definitions for the word poverty as there are organizations set up to work towards its end. In my flat in London I’ve never dared to think of myself as being impoverished. But, after my curiosity being peaked and doing a little research, I realized that every single one of these definitions mentioned a lack of what is essential for survival. Does the fact that I have gone multiple days without food put me on the edge of the poverty line, even while I sit in a riverside flat trying to figure out the next alternative for food? Or perhaps this simply makes me a bad planner.

No parent wants his children to grow up not knowing where their next meal is coming from. For that matter no parent wants to see his child lack in anything. If the certainty of a next meal is the minimum standard for successful parenting, then my mother and father failed miserably. And yet the wealth of what they could give me allows me to survive in a world where nothing is guaranteed, even my next meal.

If poverty, as some organizations such as the UN defines it, is simply the lacking of a necessity in life, then we are all impoverished in one form or another. And in many cases it is the “wealthiest” amongst us who are actually the most impoverished. The myth of an independent and self sufficient life, reflected in even these definitions of poverty, not only perpetuates a misconception but also actively pulls us away from relationships of interdependence. If we are loved, we may not know where the next meal is coming from, but we do know those around us will not let us starve. Someone will notice, someone will help, provided we are willing to show our blatant vulnerability freely, and admit we are all lacking in something which is needed to survive this difficult task called living.

Looking back to the times I’ve been without food, without help, temporarily impoverished as it were, much of it has been due to my own stubbornness and unwillingness to admit to my own need. I am not saying that doing so would wipe out poverty or all hungry people would have their problems solved if they simply admitted they needed help. My disability does not go away simply because I have the assistance I need. The fact I am being fed does not negate the fact I cannot feed myself anymore than the fact a homeless man has a bed for the night negate the fact that he is, indeed, homeless. But we are lying to ourselves if we do not admit that each of us are in need of something which makes life livable.

I cannot feed myself and that’s awful. More days than I care to count I’ve spent vast stores of energy trying to figure out where my next meal is coming from. By some standards this would label me as being ‘impoverished.’ But it is what we lack as well as our excesses which make us interact and inspire life into each other when no other solution would allow us to maintain momentum. I am unable to eat on my own and the solution to this problem means I have a wealth of dinner dates and friends to meet for coffee who tell me that I feed them as much as they feed me. Usually I do a pretty good job lining up these appointments 3 times a day to ensure I do not go hungry. On the days that this fails, I am forced to admit my weakness rather than letting it be implicit. I am forced to call someone and say “I need help.” And I am forced to admit that with the number of people who love me enough to come to my aide, I am far from being impoverished.

Communion Sunday brings out the OCD in me. Ever since I was little I would dread the first Sunday of the month in church. It was literally disaster waiting to happen. First there were plates stacked on top of each other filled with the worlds tiniest glasses filled to the brim with grape juice or wine, both of which stain horribly. My mother wouldn’t let me bring a container of salt with me to church as a precautionary measure, despite all of Christ’s allusions to us being ‘the salt of the earth.’ Then our church raised enough money to buy new carpeting for the sanctuary, thus also raising the stakes for the severe consequences of dropping that which was to be symbolic of the blood of Christ. As if that wasn’t enough tension, our elders never could get the knack of passing the plates along the pews. Inevitably the men would have to do something which resembled the Electric Slide down the aisle as they never knew which pew would end up with which plate next. Often two plates of bread would be coming at you from opposite sides and created a cosmological traffic jam.

I once visited my friend’s church and discovered that Catholics all drank out of the same cup. This, of course only added to my obsessive compulsive disorder. Communion Sunday was an enormous risk. Who was stupid enough to think this was a good idea?

The more I am involved in a church, the more I find myself looking to God and saying “How on earth did you ever think this was a good plan?” Just about every philosophical outlook on the world has some serious problem with the topic of free will. For those who believe in an all knowing, all loving and all powerful deity the issue is particularly sticky. We all want a deus ex machina to swoop down in a blaze of glory and fix it all when we are in a crisis. We want a god who is a very visible superhero, complete with tights and Jimmy Olsen taking photographic evidence. Even those of us who are absolute atheists would very much like to see a world which is a vast improvement on this one.

For the followers of Christ, free will in a fallen world is counterintuitive. The fact that one can freely come to the table and drink the wine which Christ gives us even when we are bumbling fools compared to our Host is shocking. What’s even more ironic to our ears is that God uses us, though we are responsible for spilling wine and forgetting which way the bread needs to be passed to take care of each other. As any guest at a dinner party will attest, there is little worse than embarrassing your host, even if it is by inadvertently dropping the wine on a beautiful new rug.

God would rather work through us and run the risk of us spilling his blood and passing his body around the wrong way than swooping in and doing everything through force. Our fumbling ways of messing up how things ought to be, misjudging what is needed to make the world truly better, even refusing to acknowledge who invited us into the banqueting hall in the first place, are exactly the actions of the type of misfits He’s always had in mind to create a perfect kingdom. To Him, it was better to risk it all and have our choice to partake in the dinner be made in freedom, than to sit down and force feed us a meal which was supposed to be celebratory.

As soon as I walk into a church and see the wine and the bread on the communion table, it takes all of my energy to not run the other direction. I worry about the plate falling, or myself choking on a piece of bread, knocking over a glass of wine or drinking at the wrong time. For a meal with the greatest cost, I confess that I am too concerned about the manners and customs to enjoy that which has been prepared especially for me. Thus making me more ungracious than the guest who, in a moment of joyful abandon, commits the worst faux pas.

Recently I’ve taken up baking every Saturday morning with my neighbors. They file in with their dishes and types of specialty tea, one of them bringing eggs, another flour, sugar, recipe book. We catch up on the news of the week as we mix and enjoy one another’s company. I am always slightly ashamed when I bring up my “baking club” to people. I’m even more ashamed when I think of the stereotypes of the craft. I do love this time when we bake together. To me it brings up images of 1950s housewives and the pastel icing that is so perfect it screams never to be eaten. I worry now that I appear like one of those domesticated goddesses who seem to know everything about the kitchen and nothing about the real world. I worry that people think that I take my shoes off when I enter my own house.

But in actuality I’m not baking in order to become this feminine ideal or even make beautiful cakes which everyone will love. I don’t bake to become the heroine of the kitchen. I bake because I am learning so much from the experience.

I bake so I can enjoy my neighbors. It’s actually becoming the equivalent of the Saturday morning cartoon watching ritual when I was a kid. The ladies pile in full of ideas and laughter and I am reminded how much I miss them throughout the busy week. We are forced to watch each other and give opinions about the meringue or marriage. Most of the women are older than I, and so hearing them speak and listening to their responses regarding issues that I am currently struggling with is a good comfort. With our Saturday morning ritual comes a dedicated time when we all come together and escape the busy world to get to know each other and what we need in our lives, better. Today in London I don’t know many other opportunities to do exactly that.

I bake because it forces me to make the best of a situation where there is no script. Inevitably something will go wrong; we run out of flour or someone puts in too much milk, the egg yolk won’t separate and it’s our last egg. All of a sudden five women have to put their heads together and figure out what can be done in an effort to counteract impending culinary doom. For once in life the problems are small and we are able to laugh about them. The cake may not rise, despite our best efforts, but we are able to fail in that limited way. While the cake may not look the way it did in the photograph, it still tastes good. Problem solving skills therefore become like a clever game rather than seeming like a rendition of a modern day Sisyphus.

I bake because it truly opens up a world of skills that I was never exposed to growing up. In England, not only do they measure things in grams, but we actually use a balance scale to tell just how many pistachios to put in the macaroons. For the first time in my life I feel exactly what bread dough needs to feel like before it is placed into an oven. In the past, women taught each other these skills in exactly the same way I am learning them now. They would come over and have the community cook a meal; allowing the younger generation to experience all the details required to perfect the meals well before they reached the helm of the kitchen. Most days we choose recipes by Nigella Lawson who is in a matter of speaking, insanely old fashioned; making everyone whip eggs by hand or blanche almonds themselves. But from this crazy insistence on ritual comes clear traditions passed on within the community from woman to young woman so that she is never isolated even when she is stuck in the domestic realm of plainly perfect housewife.

I love Saturday mornings. It’s my favorite part of the week now. Some mornings I can here the laughter from down the road as the women meet up with each other before entering my flat. Ease and perfection isn’t always considered standard, and simple things are really exciting. I will never fit the perfected housewife mode, I don’t want to. I have other dreams and goals for my life so it’s ok when we make lousy mistakes and burn the pavlova. Real people sometimes get to talking so much about life that they forget that the pudding is still in the oven.

It’s the simple things in life that you usually don’t bother to understand. This is particularly true if you’re have a physical disability from very early life. You watch your father cook maybe once, it being difficult to see the countertop from a seated position, and after that you hear words like boil, sauté, fry and they literally mean nothing. Everything is simply something that Dad does standing in front of a stove. The idea of me, heat, metal, and sharp objects strike most people as a very bad combination. So when someone is always going to fry your eggs for you, you never learn what exactly frying an egg means.

Three weeks ago, when I committed myself to learning how to crack an egg, I couldn’t even think of holding one. The logic in my head went something like this: eggs are wrapped in special containers at the store, despite this, they still often break before one gets them home, the empty eggshells I see are brittle and paper thin. Ergo: eggs are extremely fragile and given my hand’s amazing ability to crush things I have no business holding them. When my friend asked me to hold an egg for the sake of warming it up from the fridge, my hands shot to behind my back and I took a step away.

I’m not sure why I even was so determined to learn how to crack an egg except that’s it’s the most difficult thing that I could think of to do. Holding one for the first time was shocking: its weight was something which was unexpectedly assaulting to my system. I thought they would be like air to hold, a brittle shell which would require just the pads of the fingertips to touch. In my twenty five year old brain, an egg felt like paper Mache, having never touched one for myself. What I found was a slippery stone that was so unexpectedly smooth that it took all five of my fingers to hold onto it.

“You’re going to have to whack the thing harder than that if you ever want to crack it,” my friend stated as I gingerly knocked it against the bowl. I was afraid the shell would end up in the bowl. Which it did. And the entire contents of the egg ended up in my lap. The worst outcome possible of attempting to crack an egg had come to reality. And the world did not end. So we move on, grabbing another egg out of the pack. (I had bought one of those super cheap value packs with fifteen low quality eggs for under a pound. I figured if I ever showed a real talent for consistently cracking eggs successfully, then I might be able to move on to organic grade free range eggs.)

The thing is about eggs, they are built in such a way that seems like they are meant to be cracked. Between the support of the yolk to the membrane which keeps the shell together after it’s cracked, man has yet to engineer any better form of packaging. But I never knew that because I had never come near holding one. The fact of my inexperience was interpreted as I could not crack an egg when, in actuality, I simply didn’t know how. To complicate the situation I technically could tell someone exactly how to crack an egg. I knew how to complete the task in theory but because I knew nothing about an egg itself, I was petrified of doing it at all. My own condition didn’t directly stop me from accomplishing a task, it was simply a lack of occurrence.

In a way, that lack of experience is them most disabling thing about being disabled. When three different therapists are watching you at age seven attempt to pour juice into a cup, there isn’t much room for the spills that come whenever you are gaining experience. And when Mom has always poured your juice for you, how can you even remotely begin to know what fine motor skills it really takes to hold a jug. There’s so much of the world you don’t even know how to begin to experience unless you can sit there and honestly be given a chance for a raw egg to fall into your lap. It’s not that you don’t know unless you try, it’s that you don’t know until you’re given the opportunity to really make a mess in order to figure out how things work.

Six days later, my friend and I made a fifteen egg omelet for a dinner party. It was made of free range eggs.

I never really realized how heavy an egg was until last week. As I put it to my friend yesterday when we were meeting for lunch, “I’ve always had people to crack eggs for me.”

This year, in a feeble effort to simulate Julie and Julia, my neighbor and I decided that we would start baking each Saturday. Four weeks into our challenge and we’ve thus far made Victoria sponge, carrot cake muffins, a diabetic coma inducing chocolate meringue (aka a gooey chocolate stack), Norwegian cinnamon rolls, and a much bigger mess on my kitchen table than I ever knew was possible. My neighbor will tell you otherwise but the mess is mostly due to my interactions. During our second week of baking I decided that this had to be a therapeutic activity rather than simply that of leisure. My mother tells me that this is proof that I’m adopted from a bunch of militant Germans.

Its not that my family isn’t so much of the baking type as it is my lack of life experience which make the idea of baking so novel. With being even semi dependent on other people comes a huge amount of both tactile and practical ignorance. People make you a cup of tea because it is either impossible or you’d kill yourself trying to make one. As a result, you don’t know how your kettle works, nor how long you steep your tea for, or why different people can take the same request (will you make me a cup of tea please) and have it come out totally differently. Don’t even think of asking my how my washing machine works, all I know is I can’t turn any of the knobs on it.

On Saturdays I am once transported back to my childhood. Actually, that cliché is incorrect as it suggests that I have experienced the sensations of baking before. I have never done anything remotely like baking before. When I go to sprinkle flour, I am still shocked at how cool it feels to the touch. I marvel at how easily it slips through my fingers. I get frightened every time I come within about one yard of even a butter knife, irrationally terrified of stabbing myself with it. And I still refuse to try and crack an egg. I can only see disaster coming out of any attempt of egg cracking. This is where my overly logical adult mind kicks in no matter how much I fight to be childlike. It I manage to crush an egg rather than crack it, I’ve done it wrong, ruining the whole thing. My adult mind should then logically tell me that the world will keep turning and there’s more eggs in the basket as it were, but my mind has yet to reach that level of maturity yet.

Learning how to crack an egg has become my newest goal. Each week my neighbor holds an egg out towards me, lovingly offering me an opportunity to challenge myself. And each week I shake my head, agreeing to watch her do it for another week. Watching someone else do it correctly doesn’t teach you half of what you learn by doing it badly yourself. And so I continue to be surprised by the weight of an egg, have no idea exactly what it takes to crack its shell, and always waiting for someone else to do it for me.

All of my knowledge about cooking comes from one woman. Because of her, there are  about seven men who will  make their wives very happy. I am the link in between.  

When M.K. and I first moved in together, I told her that I wanted to learn everything she knew about cooking. She was thrilled to have someone else to cook for. Menu planning began soon thereafter, and Friday trips to Borough Market became a tradition. As M.K. moved in during the month of January, little except root vegetables were in season.  We would bundle up to run past Southwark, to take refuge from the depressive London weather under the green victorian canopies, and look for cilantro and saffron. Every color imaginable was there, like a market full of flowers hidden from the grey sky. By the time M.K. was done with her Masters in the Spring, we were grabbing our baskets and visiting the market in skirts on our way home from the library. 

In between studying for finals and memorizing monologues came dinnertime, and the hour or so before that was spent preparing food.  This soon became my favorite time of day. Since I couldn’t cook, I would sit on the floor of the kitchen, crouched beside the door, and we would talk… about everything. M.K. would come up with arguments for her dissertation, and I would try to figure how to handle the intraoffice politics of my first job. While the meal cooked, I ran lines and tried to memorize recipes. We fed each other with food and conversation, making sure that both would stick to our insides. 

The following year I found myself living near a group of guys, who quickly became my loyal friends. They ranged in age from 18 to 30 and had never cooked a meal in their lives. And I needed food. So they started a rotation of cooking duties, each one cooking in my flat for a week in between our drama school classes.  On Sunday one guy moved in, not knowing how to boil a pot of water, and, by that Saturday, he could at least make chicken korma. Meanwhile, I had made a very complex and three dimensional friend.

While teaching the men how to cook, I got to know their backgrounds and families, philosophical views and failed relationships. The dinner hour would last for three or four times longer than the title dictates. There is something undeniably unique about food that brings people out of themselves and allows them to relate to each other. The fact that we all need to be fed dismantles some guard we usually hold up. The enjoyment of food, the creative act of cooking, the careful combination of considering taste and nutrition are completely life affirming in every aspect.  It forces us first to admit that we are human and weak and then admit we each have an unlimited capacity for  joy and satisfaction. We cannot help but open up when there is a good meal on the table. 

During this time of year Borough Market begins to pick up in speed. Spring means full  baskets and skirts that catch both breeze and sunlight. Greens return, and every other color in the market is vivid and electric. We have survived winter, and now there are picnics and strawberry smoothies to look forward to. M.K. is now working on an organic farm back in the U.S., and we still send recipes back and forth online. The latest one she sent will be perfect for when all the guys come over next. They love using the food processor. And although they have never met M.K., I think that if she dropped by for dinner that night, they would think they had already met her.