October 20, 2022
It’s unfortunately the case that roasting a rotten eggplant does nothing to improve the situation. I love eggplant, enough that I displaced some tomatoes this year to make room to grow it for the first time. I’d call it a success; we harvested a few fruit before leaving for a long summer west coast visit; a handful grew while we were away, and were, I’m assured, contendly consumed by our house sitter and neighborhood friends. When we returned, we collected a half dozen more over a few balmy September weeks. So, $3 eggplant seedling, a dozen eggplants; that’s a win.
Despite my love for eggplant, I never seem to have a plan for cooking it that doesn’t take more than a weeknight’s level of effort. Activities are ramping up this fall in a way our family hasn’t really experienced up until now–before Covid, our kids were 3 and 1. But now there’s soccer, ballet, swimming lessons, small group, Christian boy scouts, and another kid. Disciplined meal planning has been the name of the game, and every weekend I craft a plan around lovingly transforming my eggplant into a feast. But as it turns out, when you’re hustling kids out the door to an after-dinner activity that starts before the family normally even sits down to dinner, you scrap big dreams of eggplant parmesan for boxed pasta and jarred sauce.
The last few eggplants just kept holding strong in the fridge, waiting for their moment. But this week they reached a breaking point; one had a fuzzy white ring around the collar and was downright gooey; clearly, compost. Two others seemed likely fine. Two had brown splotches up and down the length and a hint of moldy fuzz, but I told myself a good hot roasting would take care of things, and I could always pare away the bad bits.
All roasting did was make it clear that the whole thing was a bad bit. Compost 3, dinner 2.
It’s the time of year–it’s been the time of year for six weeks or so–when food comes in a rush. Dozens of tomato blossoms fill the plant after the ebbing of the hot August sun that kept new growth at bay. Peppers, figs, beans: I’ve been gathering more than we can eat. The market overflows with abundance, the final throes of peaches and nectarines a few weeks ago, big bunches of basil threatening to go to seed, bins of corn on the verge of getting starchy. I remember when I was growing up, in a farming town, it wasn’t unusual for high school classmates to miss school in the fall, as all hands on deck brought in the harvest. But once the harvest is in, there’s plenty of processing to be done to avoid returning it to the dust from whence it came: beans to freeze, corn relish to can, figs to jam, tomatoes to roast and pop in jars for a January treat. There’s a perpetual bowl of cherry tomatoes on the counter, half ready to burst, and refilled faster than we can eat them. I can’t keep up.
It all takes time, time I haven’t had between ballet and termite remediation quotes and my demanding day job. I’ve been feeling like I need to play hookey so I can put up the piles of food languishing in my kitchen, the final stages of all that work, starting with replenishing the soil last winter so it would have the umph to put forth all this food. If the food I grow is destined for the compost pile, I could have saved myself the trouble and ended up with the same thing. I get mad at myself for the waste–of food, of the opportunity, of the foregone pleasure it could have provided–but I rarely have margin during the workweek to get it done.
At least there’s the weekend, where, when we’re in town and there aren’t multiple kid birthday parties or church events, I can process my way through an extraordinary amount of produce, turning whole piles of a previous week’s harvest or market haul into a row of pretty little jars. At least, a previous iteration of myself could do that. Every now and then things align and I have a few uninterrupted hours for elective kitchen work, work that is almost play, but driven by the need to convert raw harvest to storable food in time is work all the same. But lately, come weekend afternoon, I just need a nap.
I’ve been gnawing on the idea of making Sabbath-taking a regular practice for some time, Sabbath-curious, you might say. I’ve told myself it’s impossible as a mom of young kids, there’s no such thing as rest. But the idea of setting aside a day to cease pursuing productivity, to celebrate and delight, and yes, to nap: it’s compelling. Sabbath keeps dancing on the margins of my consciousness. I hear a comment about how it isn’t an individual discipline, isn’t solitude and silence–it is inherently practiced in community. If I have young kids, they are part of the community I practice with. I hear an observation that it isn’t actually optional; it’s a command. But more than that, it’s a gift God wants to give us. It was instituted to show formerly enslaved people what it means to be free; would I not want to accept that gift of freedom? I’m being persuaded, but still struggling to work out how to do it in practice. How do I signal an intention to cease from work in the full time role of mom?
One week the Sabbath-radar seems to spill over, centering it in my mind as the weekend approaches. A stroke of inspiration: the idea that I could make a ritual of the simple swap of my usual Apple watch for a beautiful pre-Apple analog watch. Give up pings and alerts for something lovely and still. What if that signaled that this day isn’t like other days, became a Pavlovian tell?
The night before my first attempt, I try to rustle up excitement among the kids, get them bought into what Sabbath is and why it is special. Tomorrow, I promise, I am not going to get mad about your messes and make you clean up. At least, I’m really going to try. We’ll have a mess holiday for the day. You don’t have to do homework or clean your room. That’s persuasive. “But for such a special celebration day,” I continue, “what kind of house would we want to walk into in the morning?”
To my great shock, my six year old gets it immediately: “A clean one!” To my greater shock, he spends the better part of a half hour helping me prepare, putting away the random object strewn about the living room, even proposing we set the table so we can walk down for a nice relaxing breakfast. He seems genuinely proud of his effort, sincerely delighted to help prepare for something special. This is the most I have ever seen him clean.
The next day, I put on my elegant golden wristwatch and leave the phone in my bedside drawer. We make it to church on time-ish, driving the route from memory, not Google maps. With nothing to alert me to what is not in front of me, I more easily stay present, cease thinking about all the unanswered emails and texts, wondering what pings might be calling. For lunch, it’s cheese and crackers, or the version I would make: also, jellies, spreads, crudites, fancy salami I bought as a treat. But it’s easy, slicing and opening jars. The baby goes down for a nap, the older kids play. There are a few clear hours in front of me, mine to enjoy: a gift for a free people.
And all I can think about is the piles of unprocessed produce that a prohibition on work keeps me from dealing with. I want so badly to get things done: piles of paper dispelled, weeds pulled and garden beds mulched over, finally doing something with all those tomatoes. But everything I want to do is driven by the urge to have finished it, not to do it for its own sake, for joy, for pleasure. What does that even mean to me in this season, if not, the feeling of finishing work? I don’t want joy to be only the relief of work complete; I want to preserve the ability to delight in un-useful things, like babies, like sunsets–the way my six year stops the action of the after-school playground pick-up soccer game one night: “everyone, stop for a minute and enjoy the sky!” It’s glowing pink and orange, a momentarily treat worth nothing but the pleasure it provides for being beautiful.
Consciously, I assent. So why can’t I slow myself down and delight today? All this undone work weighs on me, almost physically painful. There’s no obvious whisper that I’d be happier if these tasks were complete, the papers gone, the produce canned. I’m smart enough to reject that at a conscious level; it’s an illogical argument. But on a subconscious level, I feel the pull all the same. There’s plenty of joy to be had in gardening, cooking, writing–but in this moment, they would be for me for the purpose of accomplishing. I walk away from the kitchen.
There’s a fat novel beside my bedside table, the second volume of Proust. It took me years to read volume one, and I don’t plan on moving through this one any faster. But I enjoy it. The writing is fluid, the observations, witty. To my knowledge, it doesn’t improve me in any way, but it makes me laugh. Reading Proust sends me into a kind of trance, a magically relaxed flow that has nothing to do with what happens in the novel (not a lot) and everything to do with the artful arrangement of words. The pleasure of un-useful beauty. I read a few pages, then curl over into an afternoon nap. I get nothing done but rest.
Even if I did manage to resist the urge to be productive, the day feels like a bust. I don’t feel ebullient and restored, ready to torpedo into the week; I didn’t have any amazing adventures. All I could muster up was meeting my most basic need. It was hard to see it as something special to celebrate, but I figure you have to start somewhere. Maybe the benefits of Sabbath take time to accumulate, kick in once the sleep debt has been paid?
And then the week flew by, easier than I thought it would be. I did get things done, at work and at home, with less time than I expected. Problems were solved with less effort than anticipated. Conversions went smoothly; agreement was reached, wordsmithing was achieved. I provide good advice, sage counsel. I enjoy the process, my colleagues. I even tackle a few of those emails you leave in the inbox out of a sort of confused dread about what they actually require of you, and end the workweek with a smaller inbox than I’ve had in a long time. And the following week, with a Sabbath looking very similar to the first one, similar tension felt in the day itself, the workweek speeds by again, easier than it should have been, ending in a new record inbox low. Could this be what happens when I give up productivity for a day?
Two points don’t make a trend, but they do make a line, and this one is at least pointing in the direction of persevering in this attempt to honor the command and receive the gift of Sabbath. I realize the point of Sabbath isn’t to game the system. But I think the point may very well be to teach me, in a visible way (even countable, if we’re talking inbox), that while it may feel like a risk to give up the known good-enough-ish I manufacture on my own, the God inviting me into the unknown is trustworthy and good. And that, more than any good I might receive, even inbox zero, makes it a risk worth taking.
With the roasted eggplant that managed to evade the compost: peel off the charred skin and blitz in the food processor with garlic, salt, tahini, lemon juice, olive oil. No set recipe, just flavor to taste. Drizzle with more olive oil, the good stuff. Tastes nothing like something you were trying to use up and just barely got around to finding an excuse to eat, and everything like an easy, decadent spread to go with a crackers and cheese lunch on a relaxed Sabbath.
