Celebratory Dinner Plans

I have two friends who will be turning 50 this year. To celebrate their passage, I'm going to plan a dinner for the beginning of May which falls in between their birthdays. This dinner will fall under my resolution of "Fun" which includes food/entertaining. Under that category, I have a subsector called new cuisines. To satisfy that resolution, I'm going to try a new cuisine: Cuban.

I spent the morning hunting up some recipes--one of my favorite things in life to do. As I'll be only 1 month post cast, I'll need to ensure that whatever I do is not too standing intensive. Here's what I plan to have:

Marinated Cuban Roasted Pork
Cuban Red beans
Avocado/Pineapple salad
Cuban Opera Cake
Mojitos

This will be a reasonably easy but festive meal. The Cuban Opera Cake is a production, but it is such a special cake--I still believe it is the finest desert cake there ever was--and deserving to be served on this important occasion. I found 4 recipes for the roasted pork, so I will use an amalgamation. The recipe calls for sour orange juice--one recipe uses a mix of orange juice + grapefruit juice to get to that ingredient. Makes perfect sense.

I'll be 48 this year, so I still have a couple of years to go before this important milestone. I don't think about it too much, and I'm not experiencing any dread of its approach. Neither my 30th nor 40th birthday produced any trepidation for me. I'm hoping that I'll embrace 50 with the same equanimity. But regardless of how our minds treat encroaching decade mile markers, our bodies may not be so idealistic in embracing such passages.

This foot break and the resulting need to press other parts of my body into service has been a real eye opener. Time passes so quickly, we forget that our aging bodies are not at their same capacity as they were 10 years ago. My husband broke his foot rather badly about 20 years ago. He was at the dump. He stepped from the bed onto the bumper and slipped. He ended up snapping two of his toe bones (3+4 metatarsals) off from the base of his foot. A clean but painful break. He was in a cast for 8 weeks, and I had a newborn. So I basically had two babies to take care of in addition to my work and house responsibilities.

But as we were remembering that and the comparative ease that he had in his own mobility and healing, he reminded me that he was in his early thirties when that happened. So here I am at 48 with a broken foot and trying to manage crutches and other mobility measures. The strain that I'm placing on the balance of my body is rather painfully apparent. I'm having to bench press the weight of my entire body on my right leg each time I go up the steps, stand up or sit down. I do think that my butt has lifted about 3 inches--and that is not a bad thing! Even in my p-w mobile (my rolling Craftsman bench) which saves my arms and leaves my hands free but places a huge strain on on my right knee. But my thighs are now feeling more like steel than butter. That's a good thing, too!

I'm facing, then, the reality of an aging body that does not make itself so apparent in normal activities. It is a reminder to me that my "body" resolution is an important one. (I keep my resolutions by my desk, and for the most part that proximity has helped my adherence to them.) We cannot stop the aging process. Age will exact its due from us despite our efforts to the contrary. Nevertheless, aging does not mean that we should abandon the goal of maintaining age-appropriate strength and suppleness, for these are the foundation of our mobility independence. I'll never have my lithe body 20 year old body again--but two weeks of bench pressing my body up and down the steps has shown me that strong and toned muscles are rather quickly (though not easily) attained once one conscripts his/her body into service.

To be truthful, I think that this foot break is highlighting my "body" resolution rather acutely. So I'm taking my injury in stride (I see the pun now in re-reading this!) and embracing the opportunity to strengthen my body and improve my crutch agility--that "Corporalita" Davincian principle. I'm just hoping that the end result is not a broken neck. I live in a two story home. Bedrooms are upstairs. So I only come down once upon waking and go up once upon retiring. It's a bit of a physcial strain to go up. Also, it is an easy place to get hurt. Accordingly, I'm careful not to go up and down the steps during the day.

Yesterday, I ascended and descended 2x more than normal--not by choice, but by necessity. I asked my absent minded son to put the dogs out around 9:30 p.m. so they could "do their business" He let them out and then went into the garage to visit with Mark and a neighbor. The garage, though attached to the house, is like an inner sanctum. It's a very nice garage: completely finished with stippled ceilings, finished walls that are painted. It is warm in the winter (with an extra kick from the wood stove if desired) and cool in the summer. Other amenities include our second fridge and a nice stereo system (the original Mitsubishi that Mark and I bought in 1983). There's not bathroom, but those guys "go out back".

My bedroom is upstairs and on the opposite side of our home. The dogs are ready to come in and they are barking (at the door under my bedroom window). I've no way to call my son--either with voice or technology--who has totally forgotten the dogs need to come in. I go down the steps (I was in bed) to let them in. Only Daisy is there. I don't know where Macy is, but Chloe, the poodle, who is mostly blind and deaf had given up and had gone skipping off too far to hear me calling her. She is blind and mostly deaf, she doesn't know that I opened the door for her, and she doesn't hear me call. I call my son (on his cell phone) to yell first and then tell him that one dog is in, but two are still out--make sure you let them in.

I go back upstairs-no easy task. I get in bed. Scratching and barking resume. Where the heck is my son. I say worse words than that to myself. I open the window, figuring that if I yell, Reade will hear me in the garage. No such luck. The scratching and barking get loader, and I'm amazed that no one in the garage can hear it. My mistake is that there is no phone that is charged in my bedroom (another nod to my son who answers the phone and cocoons it away). I'm spitting mad. I'm doing the equivalent of stomping with my crutches and I'm cursing and hissing. I go thumping down the stairs (which is easier than going up, as gravity is working, sometimes dangerously, on my behalf) to let the remaining two dogs in.

I called my son again on the phone, yelling at him for not letting the dogs in after I asked him to. He said that he thought from our first conversation that all of them had come in. I'm astounded how he could have fathomed that from our conversation, but he (like most teenagers) hears what he wants to. I then go thumping up the stairs. I'm still hissing and spitting. I have two crutches in my left hand, and I'm holding the banister with my right. I'm skooching up on my butt on stair at a time. My right leg and left arm have to do most of the hoisting. Each time I go up a stair I'm slamming the crutches on the step (they are aluminum and are making a terrible clatter together).

My daughter comes in (from the garage which has abducted my entire family and in which they cannot hear a thing), and she hears my thumping and clattering up the stairs and asks, "Mom, what are you doing?". I say, "I'm going up the f'n stairs." I later apologized. But I was so angry. It is so hard on my legs and arms to get up those steps I'm beyond furious that my son has absented his follow up responsibilities from his mind.

It is quite likely that my son will die at my hand. It is unlikely that I can post from jail. Therefore, if this blog becomes strangely silent, you can surmise that because I've had to negotiate the stairs while my family is partying in the garage away from their responsibilities and my desperate pleas for help one of the following have happened (1) I'm dead from having fallen or too crippled to post or (and this never seemed so much of a possibility as it did last night) (2) I'm in jail, as I've dispatched a member(s) of my family to the netherworld for being so neglectful!

They've been very solicitous this morning, so I'll cross of (2), but I'm sorry to say that (1) is always a possibility!