To those growing older and soon to part

This article, by Jim Battersby, Minister Emeritus, Auckland, was written a few years ago. I came across it while working for the Presbyterian National Mission Office (now unfortunately, no more). It's an excellent piece, full of good advice. I was given permission at the time to reproduce it. 

Dear Jack and Grace,
In a recent phone conversation, Jack mentioned that as you are now both in your 80s, you have been talking about the inevitable parting that is ahead of you. That’s good. It is realistic. Sooner or later one of you is going to be left. I recall only one occasion when husband and wife died together, and that was in a car crash. Although my parents died within a few weeks of one another in their late 80s, both my grandfathers outlived their spouses by some years. In my years of ministry, I have met many “relicts” as they used to be called.
I myself have been “solo” since I was 72 – more than 11 years. I know something of the pain of parting, and the change of circumstances that follows. Of course, nothing can really prepare us for this eventuality, but I think something could be done to temper those agonising bewildering months and years that follow. Finding out the hard way of the many things I was faced with when my Barbie died, I have tried to leave information that may be of ready assistance to my children when my time comes to die.
I think the most important first step is for couples to talk about the inevitable parting, each explaining to the other what their wishes are about such things as content of funeral services, burial or cremation, and where ashes should go. Not all couples are equally familiar with financial arrangements about the home, where important documents are kept, what bills have to be paid and when, where family records are kept, where the record of Christmas cards exchanged is (useful for notifying friends of the other’s death), the addresses of close friends of one that may not have been close friends of the other. (A good idea might be to keep a notebook “Where to find” you could each enter such things in.) Often the husband or wife has handled such things by him/herself. It is often the husband who has attended to the outside chores. He knows from years of practice where the lawn mower is, how to start it, whether it uses petrol or petrol and oil; where seeds are kept and when they should be planted, what are all the gadgets he keeps in his workshop, and so on.
On the other hand, it is often that the wife has done the shopping, cooked the meals, done the housework, leaving the husband ignorant of such arts. If you haven’t worried about meals much, you need to know your way around a supermarket, what cuts of meat there are etc, how to plan meals, how to cook them - at what temperature and for how long. These are mysteries that many men have not been let in to, or have not seen fit to be concerned about.
Then the awful day arrives without warning!
In latter years, my wife used to ask me to take a turn with the cooking. My usual reply was that in our generation the women looked after the indoors while the men took charge of the outdoor tasks around the home. I don’t quite know what prompted my change of heart, but while we were overseas my wife took ill. Sometime after, I promised her that when we got home, that for a start, once a week, on Wednesdays, I would plan the evening meal, buy the necessary ingredients, prepare and cook the meal, and wash up afterwards. We got home on a Thursday, and she died very suddenly the following Tuesday morning. So my promise was never fulfilled.
But I had all the shopping and cooking, washing, cleaning and so on to do on my own, thereafter. One unexpected help to me was memories of my mother or wife’s housekeeping that I had unconsciously recorded. Another help I received at first was “my Little Red Cookbook” - a recipe book I started when my wife was ill about 10 years before she died. This was a compilation of basic meals and at what temperature to cook them, and how much is a “little of this, and a pinch of that”, and “how long  until it looks cooked” etc. I nearly drove my wife (and also my sister) mad getting precise details. Soon after Barbie died I went to a night school nearby to try to enrol in a basic cooking class. Only cooking classes for Italian and Asian foods were available! So I learnt a lot by trial and error, augmented by advice from my sister and some friendly ladies.
Another helpful thing would be to make a list of whom you want to have your very personal possessions (like jewellery or tools etc), and if you have any requests about the disposal of other personal possessions.
One of the best things I ever did (and it was in our 70s), was to raise a matter that had for years been between us, undiscussed. With trepidation I slowly raised this (after a couple of stumbling attempts, I admit), and we talked it out. Each was able to explain to the other his/her situation way back, the circumstances, attitudes, understandings and misunderstandings at the time and over the years. It was a tremendous relief to both of us. One of the unexpected spin-offs was that we fell in love again, and I had the good fortune in our last few months of taking her into my arms daily and more, and saying, “I love you so much my darling”. Barbie echoed this in her own words. We knew that when the time came for parting, there would be no regretted “unfinished business” of this nature. This proved most significant to me.
I learnt from this, how important it is for couples at any age, but especially if they are growing older, to make the opportunity to discuss things previously left unsaid, but which are at the back of their minds. Such things may be in the nature of confessions – or perhaps even more importantly and easily overlooked, expressions of how wonderful the other is, how much is owed to that person, the depth of one’s love, and similar endearments. Even to say often, “I love you” is important at the time, and  vital in memory. All this kind of thing, if left undiscussed, features later as unfinished business, and “the book once closed cannot be re-opened”.
It is also important to talk about, or even record for the other, what you remember about your ancestors, and maybe your own back ground. This can be done via a tape recording. While your spouse may value this, your children and grandchildren will probably value it even more.
It could be that with the years, your spouse has developed infirmities of some kind – e.g. loss of sight, hearing, mobility, and has become quite dependent on you. Have you ever thought of sharing ideas of how you spouse could best cope without you – what alternative aids could be available, what kind of care might be best, how you could avoid if possible, putting a burden on your children, especially
on the only one who is nearby? One often has better insight into the other and his/her “quirks of character” than the person him/herself, and may be able to suggest inner strengths not yet tapped, and better attitudes of coping with difficulty.
One of the things I have missed most – and I don’t know the answer for it, is the opportunity to talk over with Barbie everyday things, and to recall together special memories, little intimacies, and personal jokes. There is simply no other who can fulfil this role, and it is a pain that just has to be borne.
On the other hand, I recognise in my “going solo” for nearly 12 years, there have been some gains. I have discovered new insights into myself, gained new interests, new activities,  new skills, new friends. I am still discovering what I don’t really want to; the strength of independence, standing on my own feet without the lifelong love and support of the other very special person.
Sometimes, but not so often now, I cry in my loneliness, which no other can assuage – I suppose it is self pity, but I excuse myself by saying it is natural and understandable. If it is a weakness, I accept it, and don’t beat myself.
Well dear friends, I hope you read and digest this, and make some use of it in pondering any ideas from it that sound useful to you. It is only one person’s point of view. But he wishes he had had as long a partnership as you two have.

God Bless, and loving regards,
Jim

Church Camp Year 2

We've been away at a church camp for the last few days - went there on Friday afternoon and came back this afternoon, so almost three whole days. My wife and I were assisting the chief cook to prepare the meals, afternoon and morning teas and suppers for up to 140 people, and keep the kitchen from getting in a total state of chaos. So it was up early (started around 7 am on average) and finishing well after the evening meal - by which time supper would also have been prepared and laid out. We did this regime last year too, though that was over a shorter period of time. We'd learned one or two tricks as a result. For instance, just because the chief cook is apparently capable to going from 7 am until whenever at night, doesn't mean we have to do the same. I remember last year sitting down at one point from utter exhaustion - after having stood for several hours (it seemed) - and feeling guilty.  This year I just went off and had a quick kip, or sat and read for a while in the motel unit we were occupying. It didn't hold anyone up and I was all the better for it (my wife did this too). In spite of that, both my wife and I have come home very weary, with sore feet and legs, and feel like having the rest of the week off. The indefatigable chief cook goes back to work tomorrow, and not in a job that's in any way lightweight.  Some people just have inexhaustible reserves.

She's also wonderful to work with. You can ask as many questions as you like and she's always patient - so you kind of receive on the job training. Next year - if there is a next year - I might even be able to make the 'home-made' ice cream from memory without having to ask her yet again what to do. (The home-made ice cream actually has cream in it, and condensed milk, and crushed up Crunchie Bars. It's unbelievably rich, and not a good thing to make if you don't have any discipline about licking up the leftover condensed milk...)

Long weekend

My wife and I spent the weekend (from Friday, just after lunch, until lunchtime on Sunday) at our church's annual family camp.  There were a 170 happy campers, some not so happy because of the heavy rain that we had (especially on Friday). They had to set their tents up in the downpours.  Most people chose to be in 'cabins' - a bit of a misnomer in this particular place, since they're more like long buildings with small rooms in them.  Either way, those people didn't get quite so wet.  

We were privileged to be housed in one of the two motel units on the site, along with the other people running the kitchen for the weekend.  (That's what we were there for, too.)   Working in the kitchen was an interesting experience: I haven't done a lot of physical work ever in my working life, and even less over the last few years, so being on my feet for hours at a time, and keeping up with the punishing routine of a kitchen providing for that many people was quite exhausting.  I got to the point on several occasions where if I hadn't sat down I would have fallen over.

Not being a cook, except in my own kitchen at home, I helped with all sorts of lesser jobs, from peeling things to cutting up things, to stirring soups, to putting more flavours into the soups, to convincing people that one soup was called Moroccan Mystery (it had a cauliflower base, which the cook said wouldn't impress people, so we didn't tell them - just let them try to guess!); to serving 170 people and telling them the names of the soups over and over, or where to get the milk, or the plates or whatever; to washing up stuff, to cleaning floors, to wiping down benches, to helping with baking (my contribution to one lot of baking was to put the flour in, and the baking powder - after that I got sidetracked onto something else); to putting out dishes and taking back the empties again, and so on.  You name it, we did it.

We not only served full-scale main meals, but full-scale breakfasts (people seem to eat a lot more when they're at a camp) and morning and afternoon teas and suppers with baking that had been done in the hours since the last meal.  Some food was brought in ready to be cooked, but not much.  Most was done on site.

With the kitchen not being fully commercial a fair degree of improvising was required on the part of  two talented cooks: they were forever juggling ovens and hot plates and oven trays and the like in order to get everything done on time.  We had some help from some of the campers who'd been rostered on to do stuff at different times, but in general we had the place to ourselves.

By Sunday the sun had come out and improved the state of things, but by Sunday my wife and I were wiped out: we didn't even manage to make it home (only an hour and a half) before we felt we had to have a snooze.  The joys of old age....

Why would you....?

One of the things about doing some baking at home is that you keep on asking one particular question: how did that first come about?   What I mean is, how, for instance, did someone work out that using gelatine in food was a good idea?   Gelatin (or gelatine), as Wikipedia tells us, is a translucent, colorless, brittle (when dry), flavorless, solid substance derived from the collagen inside animals' skin and bones.   Who first discovered it anyway, and why would you go from there to using it in food?

Or take this?   In one of the recipes we used today we separated the egg white from the egg yolk.   Who would have thought this was a good idea, and having separated them, then go on to whisk the white in such a way that it becomes no longer liquid but something that's able to be tipped upside down in the bowl and still stay there?   Doesn't that strike you as odd?


All cooking is a kind of chemical experiment, I guess, and each recipe is basically just a set of instructions telling us how to change certain elements from one thing to another, combining them in some cases, altering them in others.   But even recipes in themselves are curious: we know from seeing cooking programmes on TV that chefs are always experimenting: but they're experimenting with the things that are known.   Who experimented in the first place, and why?

Streep and Adams

I watched two movies over the last two nights which both starred Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. The first was Julie and Julia, the second, Doubt. The first might be a chick flick, by description, the secondly is a serious adaptation of a seriously successful stage play.
I'd heard some reports about J&J which made me think I didn't want to see it; in fact it turned out to be a delight - well, at least the Meryl Streep part of it did. Amy Adams played a thirtyish woman, rather self-centred, not terribly sure of herself, who is persuaded by her husband to blog about cooking her way through Julia Child's cookbook, in a year.
Streep plays Child about fifty years earlier, at a time when she was trying to find out what she wanted to do with her life. And did find out, most successfully, as it turned out.
There were quite a few connections between the two characters, (both have 'saints' for husbands) who never actually meet in the movie (though there was a hint towards the end that it might happen), and the thing flits back and forth between the two periods with considerable ease.
The revelation of the film, however, is Streep's performance. It could be described as a striking imitation of Child - and everything is there: the awkwardness because of her height, the delicious laugh, the nonsequiters, the mutterings and mumblings, the surprised little noises. But it's much more than an actress playing the part of a person most of us will have seen on TV at some point. Streep thoroughly inhabits the role, so that you seldom think about her 'performing'; she just scoops Child up holus bolus and presents her as she would have been if she herself had made a movie at the time.
Streep has always had an uncanny knack of getting the voice right in a movie - I can still 'hear' her in the Australian film she made about Lindy Chamberlain. She had that accent down pat, and managed to make herself Australian, if that's the word I'm looking for. And she's done it in other movies too. But her Julia Child is a marvel. And the scene with her sister, with both of them full of delight at seeing each other again, and full of fun and full of suggestions that there might be a 'tall' man for the sister to marry (she opts for a small bloke, as it happens) is one of the best scenes in the movie.
Amy Adams has a slightly thankless role; she's never going to get the sympathy Streep gains, and there are scenes where she's required to turn the audience off her. And does.
Her role in Doubt is similar: another slightly self-centred character who's either more naive than she looks, or just a little conniving. I wasn't sure what to think about her. Still, she's a good deal more sympathetic than the Streep character, who is the devil incarnate when she gets going. Sure, she has a couple of sympathy scenes with an elderly nun who's losing her sight, but these are utterly overwhelmed by her sheer awfulness in every other scene. The priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman in an ambiguous role that never quite clarifies where he's at) calls her the Dragon in an early scene. She's far more than that. She's prepared to lose her soul to prove her point, and possibly does.
The story, set in 1964, centres around a large Catholic school run by nuns, with a priest theoretically in charge, but pushed to one side by Sister Aloysius. She doesn't like anything he does, doesn't like his sermons (which are short and punchy), doesn't like his use of a ballpoint pen, his need to have three lumps of sugar in his tea, his longish fingernails, but most of all, his concern for the one black boy in the school. Sister A takes it into her head that the priest is homosexual, and perhaps he is - neither the movie nor Hoffman ever allow it to be definite - and that he's intent on corrupting the boy. She determinedly brings him down - at least as far as her limited realm is concerned (he's given a 'promotion' at another parish, and school) - and makes sure that her control-freak nature is satisfied to the max. But at the end....doubts.
The film has some marvellous sustained scenes lifted directly from the play, I guess, but otherwise is opened out naturally, without any sense that scenes are broken up just for the sake of it. I've seen some of it twice now, and it remained as powerful on a second viewing as on the first.
Incidentally, the Julie character in J&J is described in the credits as being 'now a writer.' Julie Powell's second book, Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, which details affairs she had after the first book's publication, as well as her experiences learning the butcher trade, was published November 30, 2009.
So much for her husband the saint....
Photo is of Julie Powell

Ratatouille

Finally caught up with the movie, Ratatouille, at the cinema. We’d been going to see it in London, but missed the showing. However, it was on in Northampton, when we got there, so along with twenty other people we went to see it.

I think my only criticism of it is that it isn’t particularly funny – certainly not laugh-out-loud funny. It’s entertaining, and the storyline is fine, and there’s quite a bit of subtle humour, but you never kind of get caught up in a great laugh at any time.

That aside, the animation is brilliant, and the story takes a rather strange idea and manages to deal with its problems successfully. A rat who’s a self-taught cook? And who’s ability in the kitchen surpasses most other cooks? Okay. It’s totally improbable, but you manage to suspend belief and let it happen.

Overall, though, the thing that impressed was the technical excellence of the movie. The characters are wonderfully drawn, even those who exist primarily as caricatures. The backgrounds have a depth and warmth not always seen in modern animation, and the cast voicing the characters are top notch too.

I missed seeing most of the actors’ names when the credits were rolling, and didn’t realise Peter O’Toole had played the nasty food critic, Anton Ego. Janeane Garofalo, an actress I enjoy seeing in movies (but haven’t very often) played the only female cook in the kitchen, and someone called Patton Oswalt was the main character, Remy. I don’t know Oswalt’s name but he’s obviously done a lot of voicing for tv. Lou Romano, who plays the boy who pretends he’s a cook, is another actor who’s known more as a vocal artist than one who’s ‘seen.’ The gyrations his character goes through in the movie probably provide the biggest laughs.

I’d like to get a copy of the movie on DVD in due course: it’s one that would repay watching again, I think, to catch up with the details.