The Yellow House

I. On a Sunday afternoon

I am making three lasagnas, one for a family member who was just diagnosed with lymphoma, one for a friend with a brand new baby, and one for my sister.

The baby and the cancer happened so quickly, seemingly days apart. Events like these make me broody about mortality and humans and life. In darker moments, it feels relentless, this onslaught of new babies and people I love falling sick, as if I will never possess arms open enough or heart big enough to welcome them and give them the tenderness they deserve, the protection they need. Three lasagnas: the puniest of offerings.

I bring the lasagna to family dinner, and everyone has seconds. Everyone is quiet while they chew. It is not okay. And yet.

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I have an aunt who likes to ask people: “If someone shook you awake in the middle of the night and asked you, Quick! How old are you? What would your response be?”

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I am in Cote d’Ivoire for work, and was in Nigeria for 12 days before that. When all is said and done, I’ll have been bouncing around West Africa for almost a month.

When we travel for pleasure, we happily suspend our routines in an excuse to eat out and explore local foods. These are the types of experiences that span beautiful, full-bleed spreads in food and travel magazines, whether it’s a high-end destination restaurant or stopping at a street food stall. Some of us even go on vacation because we want to eat something particular, want to spend an afternoon in a French café or walk down a street in Bangkok with the burn of chili on our tongues.

But when we travel for business (at least, for non-food-related business, I suppose), those of us who are hungry often end up disappointed.

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I skipped out on talking about Thanksgiving food this year. Don’t get me wrong, I like Thanksgiving. It ranks higher for me than other, soon-to-follow winter holidays, which stress me out with their gift giving. I’m even pretty decent at making Thanksgiving happen: I can cook. Thanksgiving does, however, typically fall pretty close to my mom’s birthday, which laces it with some quiet sadness.

I started this blog in the wake of my mom’s death. At the time, I didn’t really realize that they coincided, but the archives here are a pretty good marker for Everything After. The site is now a little less than five years old. I don’t think I ever thought I would continue for this long.

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Ben has been on a weird but compelling futurist kick lately. Basically this means that in the car or in evenings we listen to podcasts about the possibility of uploading your consciousness to the Internet, or the most currently hostile environments on Earth, or what a world with 10 billion humans would look like. By turns apocalyptic or starry-eyed techno-optimistic, the types of people we have been listening to make you feel very, very small and unimportant in the vast universe, while at the same time convinced that you are using way more resources than the tiny machine of your body could ever be entitled to. Dinner table conversation has been interesting, mostly because I can’t quite wrap my head around uploading one’s consciousness.

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