What would whoever do?

Go to the grocery store, make some soup, keep going

Good day from my office, which smells like soup. It could be worse! I will let you imagine your own version of worse.

I have, we have, arrived at the season of soup for lunch — plus or minus a piece of good toast, plus or minus salted butter, plus or minus a couple of slices from a block of sharp cheddar. Soup is what a house should smell like when it’s forty degrees (Fahrenheit) outside. Today’s iteration was autumn vegetable, perked up with lemon and dill, Sunday afternoon’s attempt to clear out the crisper drawers by dumping them into a pot and waving over it a copy of Mollie Katzen’s Still Life with Menu. The world is crumbling. I will not waste the semi-flaccid carrot nubs lolling at the bottom of the bag.

Not unrelated: this minute and perfect poem that landed in my inbox yesterday, courtesy of Matthew Ogle’s newsletter “Pome”:

Prose poem

Another day in the ruinous world, eating
peanut butter off a knife.

Tom Snarsky (2023)

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Often, when I don’t know what to do — what to write, what to say, how to dress —I think of someone I admire, someone I consider very smart, and try to channel them. I imagine them into my situation and borrow their sensibility to solve it. I am aware that some people have an acronym for this: WWJD. My version is more like, What would [name of fashionable acquaintance] wear? How would [name of brilliant writer] begin this essay? (NOT with the smell of soup?)

Over the years, I have attempted to channel a variety of savants: David Byrne, George Saunders, Sarah Ryhanen, a mom at my daughter’s school, another mom at my daughter’s school, Frank O’Hara, and others, such as the grandmotherly lady with whom we fell into conversation one afternoon last December outside the “Nutcracker house”, who effused about the crows and songbirds that visit her house and whom we now privately, within our family, refer to as Mrs. Noodlekugel, because she had the air of someone who’d have a talking cat and a trio of near-sighted mice.