Goodnight, Johnny Starr
I have put off writing this post for four weeks, because clicking "publish" on a blog post is a public announcement that one more person who loved me is gone from this world. It's selfish to grieve for that reason, but I don't care. He loved us for how we made him feel, too. And I could not possibly have felt any more loved.
On Friday, August 11th, my sweet, affectionate, hilarious grandfather ate lunch (at the rehab facility we hoped he'd soon be getting out of), closed his eyes for a nap, and did not wake up again. In the six months since our grandmother passed, he told us often that he was ready to go. That he could have suffered a heart attack in the middle of the night, slumped on the bathroom floor for who knows how long before his aide found him in the morning, just goes to show you how tough he was. At 92, for crying out loud!
On my last visit home before he died, I gave him a hand massage (when Kate and I were visiting together we'd do both hands at once) and, for the first time, asked if he'd like me to massage his feet as well. It makes me sad how embarrassed elderly people can be about the state of their toenails—who cares, right? you've been using the same pair of feet for how many decades?!—but he wanted a footrub too much to demur.
I was just about finished the first foot when his lunch arrived, and afterward he was drowsy so I let him sleep and promised I'd do his other foot the next day.
The next day, he slept all through my visit.
The day after that, I met my aunt and uncle at the rehab facility, and he napped through that visit, too, except he did this weird thing where he'd respond to people talking in the hall. "You don't mind if I sleep, do you? I'm sorry," he said at one point when he realized we were there, and we told him not to apologize, he could sleep all he wanted.
As we left I gave him a kiss on the forehead, and that was that. I never got to finish his footrub.
The two most important things to know about my grandfather were his playfulness and his devotion. Even after he retired, he always worked too hard mowing and shoveling and whatnot—he literally had a heart attack and lost consciousness in the garage one hot summer day. And when my grandmother became ill, he remembered his wedding vows. No matter what, he was not going to let her go into a nursing home. He took care of her—with help from home health aides most days—every single day for the rest of her life. My grandparents weren't up for attending Kate and Elliot's wedding back in February, but I recorded a mini-interview with them that we could play at the rehearsal dinner.
Me: What do you think of Elliot?
Grandmom: Oh, I think he's fantastic. Nobody better than him.
Me: Nobody better than him, right?
Grandmom: That's right. He's the best.
Me: The best of all men!
Grandmom: The men of all men! That's right.
Me: I know another great man. A good husband! What do you think about Elliot?
Grandpop:[through a mouthful of dinner] I think he's a very nice felshon. I'm in love with him!
I just think it is so adorable that he couldn't decide between "fellow" and "person" so he went with the portmanteau.
A post shared by Camille DeAngelis (@cometparty) on Jul 30, 2017 at 7:28am PDT
My aunt Kathy (who has done an AMAZING job of juggling finances and healthcare headaches for the past four years, bless her soul!) told me not too long ago that my grandfather's definition of success was to be able to save enough money to leave an inheritance to his children. By that measure (and others), he was absolutely a success. When I called him he sometimes used to say, "Didja make any money for me today?", which used to irritate me when I was out of print and flat-out broke, but eventually I realized I needed to lighten the hell up. So when he'd say, "Didja make any money for me today?", I'd reply, "Oh, yes. Potloads of money. Tomorrow I'm going to send you a check for a million dollars."
I've been thinking a lot about all that these past four weeks: what a good worker and saver he was, how devoted he was to the people he loved. I've been clinging to the notion that the best way to honor him right now is to work as hard as I can—and when I get paid for that work, to put a good bit of it aside for something bigger than my own keeping.
My grandfather showed me how to be a good-hearted human. So I will work hard. I will remember to laugh at myself. And I will always show my family how much I love them.
(See also: Hat for a Wise Man; Pizzelles!; The Big Sixty; In Memoriam.)
In Memoriam
Today would have been my Grandmom Kass's 89th birthday. She passed in her sleep one week after Kate and Elliot's wedding in February.
I wrote in my journal:
I thought I had done my grieving in advance, bit by bit over the past four years. Turns out that's not how grief works, at least not for me.
It took me awhile to post about her death (for reasons I won't get into), but here's what I eventually put up on Facebook:
Today we're back in New Jersey, gathering with relatives for a Mass said in her name (in lieu of a funeral, which she definitely did not want) and takeout from our favorite Italian restaurant afterward. I miss her, he says when we call, and we can hear the tears in his voice.
You had a good long life together, we tell him. I can't begin to imagine what it feels like to lose the person you chose to share your life with, especially when you've been inseparable for seventy years. Even if she was leaving you little by little.
But I do know one thing: it is not possible to say "I love you" too many times.
Sugaring Season
There is something inexpressibly sad in the thought of the children who crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and the fathers of Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Boston, and the infancy of those born in the first years of colonial life in this strange new world. It was hard for grown folk to live; conditions and surroundings offered even to strong men constant and many obstacles to the continuance of existence; how difficult was it then to rear children!
A few years back I read Alice Morse Earle's Child Life in Colonial Days as research for a project currently on the back burner. Here's my favorite passage, which I kept forgetting to post at the appropriate time of year (until now!):
The first thought of spring brought to the men of the New England household a hard work—maple-sugar making—which meant vast labor in preparation and in execution—all of which was cheerfully hailed, for it gave men and boys a chance to be as Charles Kingsley said, "a savage for a while." It meant several nights spent in the sugar-camp in the woods, a-gypsying. Think of the delight of that scene: the air clear but mild enough to make the sap run; patches of snow still shining pure in the moonlight and starlight; all the mystery of the voices of the night, when a startled rabbit or squirrel made a crackling sound in its stealthy retreat; the distant hoot of a wakeful owl; the snapping of pendent icicles and crackling of blazing brush, yet over all a great stillness, "all silence and all glisten." An exaltation of the spirit and senses came to the country boy which was transformed at midnight into keen thrills of imaginative fright at recollection of the stories told by his elders with rude acting and vivid wording during the early evening round the fire; of hunting and trapping, of Indians and bears, and those delights of country story-tellers in New England, catamounts, wolverines, and cats—this latter ever meaning in hunter's phrasing wild-cats. Think of "a wolverine with eyes like blazing coals, and every hair whistling like a bell," as he sprung with outspread claws from a high tree on the passing hunter—do you think the boy sat by the fire throughout the night without looking a score of times for the blazing eyeballs, and listening for the whistling fur, and hearing steps like that of the lion in Pilgrim's Progress, "a great soft padding paw."
What forest lore the boys learned, too: that more and sweeter sap came from a maple which stood alone than from any in a grove; that the shallow gouge flowed more freely, but the deep gouge was richest in sweet; and that many other forest trees besides the maple ran a sweet sap.
Twenty Years Later
I'm remembering my beautiful grandmother today, twenty years after her passing.
No Good at Juggling
I never learned how to juggle—literally or figuratively, as you can tell by all the balls I've dropped over the past several months. I have a bad habit of getting really excited for new projects and forgetting about the ones I haven't finished yet.So, mostly for my own benefit, I'm putting them down here so I can get to work on wrapping them up:
Can-Do Vegan: Now that I've finished the definitive revision on the 2016 novel (it's been accepted! HOORAY!!!) I can get back to work on this baby.
Vegan By the Seat of Your Pants: This one's on the back burner for the time being.
Vegan Cookery & Pastry: Same deal. (I wish I could clone myself at least three times.)
The Boston Independent Bookstore appreciation series: This one is resuming in the next couple of weeks, I promise!
Uganda and Rwanda 2013: I stopped blogging this trip because I didn't know how to write about the genocide and the landmarks we visited, or if I should. But I have to get over that, because there are great pics and stories left to share.
Israel and Jordan 2014: Stopped blogging out of sheer laziness, I suppose!
#100happydays of drawing: I finished this challenge last summer but never tweeted the rest of my sketches. I'll probably blog the highlights sometime soon.
I need to add yet another project to this list, haha: I audited Intro to Hinduism at Tufts this past semester, and I promised my professor I'd do a blog series in lieu of turning in assignments or taking the exams. I'm aiming to post the first installment tomorrow.
All this is in addition to actual book projects, of course. I have something big to share with you, hopefully later on this summer!
Quiet Time
I'm in the middle of one of those spells when blogging doesn't feel like a productive use of my time. Sometimes it's easy, because I'm trying to be useful but I'm ultimately doing it for my own amusement, so I don't mind so much that my sister is usually the only one leaving comments.
It's not amusing right now though. The never-enoughness, the needing-to-be-seen-ness, the ultimate futility of social media and book promotion is really bumming me out.
Most of the time I consider myself an optimist. Not today though, and that's okay.
I'll be back when it's fun again.
The Merriest EVER
Found this at the Somerville Flea (indoors at the Armory). Let's just pretend my name is Eva Christiansen and I bought this card at Woolworth's, signed it, and mailed it to you. Happy Holidays, everybody!
My Favorite Veteran, Captured on Paper
Today at the beginning of yoga class my teacher said, "Think of all the people who did all they did so that you could have off today."
And I cried a little.
My grandfather's shipmate sketched this portrait in 1943 (as you can see). He was twenty-three. This drawing captures him perfectly.
(I've been writing about him, actually. I'm not ready to show you yet, but I'm very excited for when the time comes.)
Memory Lane
My grandparents are slowly cleaning out their house. There were lots of practical items they encouraged us to take—roughly twenty years' worth of hotel soaps, and I am now the proud owner of a pizza stone and a Pyrex baking set (yay!)—but other things were sentimental. 
(For more old-school Sesame Street, check out my Viewmaster.) 
We also found some board games from the late '60s, which were good for a laugh: 
(Back to your regularly-scheduled craft post next week!)
Champagne and telescopes!
TA DA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Spiffy, right? I am so in love with this new site, and so grateful to LeahCreates for designing it for me. I really wanted something clean and fresh and simple, and this is perfect. (I would like to cut and stitch my own handmade header at some point—I can see it so clearly in my head—but for now this is just right.)Now I suppose the most obvious question is, what is a comet party? (And as a part-two to that question: why "comet party" instead of my own name? As an author, don't I kinda need to put my name all over this site?)The phrase "comet party" had been appearing again and again in my notebooks over the past few years. I knew it was important—a message from my subconscious, or whatever you want to call it—but I also knew that it wasn't meant to be a book title. I loved the idea of a bunch of astronomy geeks in tuxes and ball gowns getting together to drink champagne and watch a comet hurtle across the night sky.Over the past year or so, the comet metaphor has grown into a way of life for me. I want to live a bright and celebratory and deeply meaningful life, and I want to help other people figure out how to do the same. That's why I became a vegan lifestyle coach in June, and why I want to offer content to inspire readers to explore their creativity on a much deeper level. Like, scary deep. Awesome deep.As for why "Comet Party" instead of CamilleDeAngelis.com? (The original URL will redirect, by the way. I just need to finish transferring some files before I take down the old site.) I could certainly go on writing novels, eventually find a cushy teaching gig at a suburban liberal arts college, and live a happy life—but I'll be a great deal happier if I keep following the same instinct that led me to build this new site. I don't want to live a comfortable, complacent life. I want to be more than a writer. I feel the impulse to share what I've learned, and it would be wrong not to honor that.Over the past five years I've had several conversations with my sister about becoming the sort of blogger who, you know, gets comments from people she doesn't know in real life; and Kate pointed out that bloggers who focus on one subject will naturally have an easier time attracting readers. I know she's right, but I'm interested in so many things—and could you imagine my starting a bunch of separate blogs for each subject?! A miscellany has always made the most sense to me, so I'm sticking to it.The ongoing spam issue and having to turn off comments only amplified the feeling that I was talking to an empty room. But the real issue, for me, is a matter of blogging as a form of community building, and that's something I really want to work on through Comet Party. This will be our shindig, mine and yours.Writing-wise, travel-wise, vegan-wise, any-wise, if there's something in particular you'd like me to blog about, please do leave me a comment. And in the future I'll do a better job of asking for your input. I'm also going to adopt a proper blogging schedule so that if you're only really interested in, say, posts on books and writing, you can just check in with me on Mondays and leave it at that. I'll still be happy to have you.Of course, I hope everyone will be interested in Where We Make, my new weekly feature on artists' workspaces. Read this post for all the whys and wherefores. Here's the blogging schedule, by the way:
Mondays: The literary stuff. Book appreciations, my writing process, and suchlike.
Tuesdays: Either travel stories or something on a more directly spiritual topic. (Yes, this is new for me. I'm going to get way more honest with you.)
Wednesdays: Vegan is love, baby! Recipes. The philosophy. General lifestyle goodies (like where to find shoes that aren't made of plastic.)
Thursdays: All things arty and crafty. Fine art, knitting, sewing, embroidery, etc.
Fridays: Where We Make! The first entry (mine!) goes up at the end of this week.
What else is new? What else do I have planned?
- To celebrate the new site, I'll be offering some giveaways in the next couple of weeks—copies of the Petty Magic audiobook and a dessert out of Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's The Joy of Vegan Baking! Yes, I am actually going to bake and send you a box of cookies (or cake, or macaroons, or whatever; your choice!) Watch this space daily, because I am a really good baker if I do say so myself. I gotta spread the word that vegan baked goods can be thoroughly delicious, because everyone seems to have a story about a vegan brownie they bought in some random coffee shop that tasted like cocoa-flavored sidewalk chalk.
- In keeping with my new tagline, "experiments in incandescent living" (you can read more here about the concept of "an incandescent mind"), I'll be throwing myself into fun new ongoing projects and documenting them on the blog. The first is veganizing a series of recipes out of Cookery and Pastry, Susanna MacIver's 18th-century Scottish cookbook (you can read her recipe for "fairy butter" in one of my Hawthornden write-ups); and the second is vegan chocolatiering. I want to learn how make my own gourmet chocolates SO BAD, and once I have the basics down I want to make fancy stuff like the violet cremes you can find at Hope & Greenwood, that most magical of London candy shops. (There's more, but these two are plenty to start. And realistically, both will have to wait until 2014.)
- More Q&As with my favorite writers, artists, and vegan luminaries. My first Q&A is with McCormick Templeman, it's REALLY juicy (for you guys who love to read and talk about the joys and mysteries of the creative process), and it's going up next Monday! I'll also be interviewing crafty friends from Squam, new friends from Main Street Vegan Academy, and my unbelievably talented audiobook narrator, Kelley Hazen.
- Some Q&As will feature giveaways of brand-new books. (Rachel Cantor! More McCormick Templeman, because you can never get enough McCormick Templeman! And if you have other suggestions for cool folks to interview, I'm all ears. And fingers.)
- In keeping with my new role as a vegan lifestyle coach and educator, there's brand-new content on this site for the veg-curious: check out my resources page and the Vegan Q&A. I know most of you aren't vegan yet, and some of you have next to zero interest in the subject, but the information is there for you if you ever change your mind.
And finally, can I just tell you how PSYCHED I am to be using WordPress, which means you can comment whenever you feel like it? I really want to hear from you. Tell me if anything I've said here has prompted some sort of reaction in you—if you're also feeling this same desire to shrug off your own limiting beliefs about who you are, what you're capable of, and what you're really meant to be doing with your life.Tell me what you'd like me to write about.And tell me if you'd like to contribute to the new site in some way—whether on Where We Make or a Q&A.Thanks so much for all your friendship and support. I'm over-the-moon excited for this...as if you couldn't tell!
Goodbye and Hello
Tomorrow I will build my new website with a very talented designer. I feel like I need a moment of silence for the old site, which Elliot built for me (including the spoon header design) in 2007 and David tweaked in 2010 when he fixed me up with a new blog. Despite frustrations with Movable Type and relentless Chinese spammers, this little home on the web has served me well for six and a half years.
So what's next? Beautiful things, unusual things, inspiring things. The new site will be like throwing a party that never ends.
It's official!
I will have a new website well before the end of September. And it will be MARVELOUS.
(Playing around with GIMP to give my designer a sense of what I'm envisioning.)
Housekeeping
(That is all. I'm switching from Google Reader and apparently I have to do this to link my blog on my profile.)
A Bit of a Pause
Good advice.I'm still here. Haven't blogged lately for two reasons: one, I'd much rather write and revise, and two, my web host is ticked off at how much spam this unassuming little blog has been attracting as of late, and they keep temporarily disabling my comments. Blogging with the comments turned off feels rather pointless, right? In the meantime, good things are happening. I'm making them happen, and that feels awesome.(I just had the loveliest week in Boston, Providence, and NYC, and the above photo was taken from Amy Lou's kitchen.)More soon, hopefully.
Great Book #43: Lord of the Flies
I somehow got out of reading this one in middle school Language Arts class, but I was always curious about it; Lord of the Flies is one of those novels nobody seems to like (or if they do they don't own up to it). It's a shocking book, but what shocked me most was how much I enjoyed it. I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author, which is always a particular treat since you hear the story exactly as it was intended to be read.
Even if you haven't read this book you've probably heard how ugly it gets: English schoolboys plane-wrecked on a deserted island during World War II attempt to form a civilization, which quickly disintegrates. Ralph is focused on maintaining a signal-fire so they can be rescued, while Jack is only interested in hunting pigs and unseating Ralph as 'chief'. Jack succeeds in turning the rest of the 'tribe' against Ralph, and they literally begin to hunt him down like a wild animal.
It doesn't matter that how they came to be there--why all boys and no girls? evacuated from where, to where? None of the boys mention having been anywhere outside of England--is implausible, and the ending even more so. The boys' descent into savagery is horrifying because it is, for the most part, believable. On any school playground anywhere in the world you can witness myriad minor cruelties that, in the absence of adult supervision, could snowball all too easily; the innocence of childhood is just a veneer over our cruel primal instincts. Jack--what is he, twelve, thirteen?--uses the prospect of a phantom in the forest to rally the boys behind him, paints his face with pig's blood, and does not care that his obsessive ambition to lead the group results in at least two violent deaths. The fearmongering and the struggle for power, the mad despot, the merciless scapegoating and the torturing of anyone who dares to disagree...it all sounds awfully familiar.
Golding's prose can be, erm, too evocative (particularly when the boys go after a wild pig with bloodthirsty glee), but some of the descriptive bits are really splendid: "the lagoon attacked them with a blinding effulgence"; "a sudden communion of shining eyes in the gloom"; "the tree trunks and the creepers that festooned them lost themselves in a green dusk thirty feet above him". And it's not just the jungle atmosphere he nails: "Piggy sat expressionless behind the luminous wall of his myopia." I wonder if somebody with perfect eyesight could understand how apt that sentence is, because I sure do. (Poor Piggy! We never find out what his real name is.)
Golding begins and ends his recording with a conversational bit about how he came to write the book. He said he had to make the group boys only, because if it had been mixed the book would have had to be primarily about sex, and if it had been only girls they would have behaved a whole lot better and there wouldn't have been a story. I don't know about that--at times in my adolescence it certainly seemed like the cattiness of girls was a far more insidious thing than the boys' tendency towards violence and domination--but I did appreciate this: 'I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men. They are far superior, and always have been.' As my grandmother says: 'Amen, brother. Amen.'
Pizzelles!
My aunt, grandparents and I baked a ton of cookies last Friday: chocolate chip, anisette toast (same thing as biscotti), almond cookies filled with raspberry jam, snickerdoodles (recipe forthcoming)...and the prettiest cookies of all, pizzelles. You can buy them in a plastic tub at the grocery store, but as with everything else in life, the homemade kind is infinitely better. Here are a few shots of my grandfather baking pizzelles using a waffle iron that's at least sixty years old.
He melts some butter on the iron, drops a gob of dough on, closes it, and leaves it on the open flame for twenty seconds or so, flipping the iron midway through and cooking for another twenty seconds.
It takes up to ten minutes for the iron to get good and hot, so the first half dozen cookies weren't golden brown like they ideally would be.Here's my grandparents' recipe, should you like to try your hand with an electric iron like this one (or look for an old-school iron on eBay, knock yourself out):
6 eggs3 1/2 cups flour1 1/2 cups sugar1 tsp. baking powder2 tbsp. vanilla or anise1/2 lb. butter or margarinehalf orange rind and juice
Whisk eggs and add sugar gradually, beating until smooth. Add cooled butter and flavoring. Sift flour and baking powder together and add to egg mixture. Dough should be sticky enough to drop by spoonful.My crazy 84-year-old grandfather doubled this recipe and stood at the stove for four and a half hours without a break, baking these pizzelles one at a time, blithely ignoring our pleas for him to sit down and rest. Crazy, I tell you.
They taste great with eggnog.(Note: I've gone vegan since publishing this blog post. A vegan pizzelle recipe is forthcoming!)
Onion Pie, mmm mmm!
[Update, 2016: check out the vegan version!]
My sister and I are doing some of the cooking for Thanksgiving this year, and today I baked this simple-but-delicious savory pie for the first time. My grandmother used to make it for family dinners.
3 cups sliced cubed onions
3 tablespoons butter
2 eggs
1/2 cup evaporated milk
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 pastry shell
My favorite pastry recipe is from David Tanis' A Platter of Figs, which yields two crusts and is equally great for sweet and savory:
2 cups flour
2 sticks of butter (cut into thin slices)
1/2 tsp. salt
1 egg, beaten, and enough cold water to make 1/2 cup
Mix the flour, butter, and salt, then add the egg and water. It'll be a little sloppy, so you'll need to throw in a bit of extra flour to make the whole thing come together. This dough needs refrigerating for an hour.
Anyway, back to the filling instructions:
Sauté onions in butter until tender. Pour in pastry shell. Beat eggs slightly then add milk, salt and pepper. Pour mixture over onions. Bake at 425º F for 18-20 minutes or until golden brown.
Some notes:
This recipe makes a 9" pie.
I added some cumin and fresh basil to the basic recipe.
I used both yellow and red onions.
The two pies were in the oven for just about half an hour.
(I'd rather not use disposable pie pans, but I am making six.)
Poll Results
Eighteen readers! Oh, you dear sweet wonderful people! That's about three times the number I was expecting.
Random nerdiness wins. Who would have thought?
Reader Poll
Hey reader, if you haven't already taken the poll at top right, I'd love it if you could do that now. I would like to blog about the things that actually interest you, so please do click on your interests even if you're a sporadic reader or don't like to leave comments (the poll is anonymous).(Admittedly, the other reason I put up the poll is that I'd like to get an idea of how many people actually read this thing. I started this blog because the Random House marketing people said I should, and I've enjoyed it very much, but does feel a little weird sometimes to be writing and posting pictures when I'm not sure if anyone but my family and close friends are reading it.)Thanks very much!