256/365 My casserole

The phone rang. It was Sheri, the woman who coordinates funeral meals. She wanted me to bring something Friday. I told her I would. Probably something tomato based, some kind of Italian casserole.

I put it out of my mind until Friday morning. I had to meet with the Presbyterian minister and get kids to school and oh, yeah, the funeral. I glanced in the fridge to see what I could whip together quickly after the meeting, but there really wasn't anything I'd want to serve to strangers. But there was a watermelon.

I cut it open--a yellow watermelon. The last bits of summer on my kitchen counter. I sliced it, thinking of the poem by John Tobias, "Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity" and how John Tobias must never have actually eaten watermelon pickle because watermelon pickle is as much like watermelon as pickled beet is like shredded beet. But the title aside, the stanza came to mind:

It was a summer of limitless bites,
Of hungers quickly felt
And quickly forgotten
With the next careless gorging.
The bites are fewer now.
Each one is savored lingeringly,
Swallowed reluctantly.

I wondered who had died, whose funeral meal I was helping to prepare with each slice of the knife. I arranged them on a plate, a plate that came with a pie I'd bought at the church barbecue last fall, a plate that could go back into the milieu of dishes and odds and ends in the basement cafeteria kitchen. I drove over to church at the prearranged time and rang the doorbell to the basement hall.

Lynn answered and I handed her the plate. She looked at it a bit funny and I explained, or apologized, that it was so simple, but that I hadn't made the casserole I was going to make.

"They'll appreciate this more," she told me in that backhanded way of hers. And I played into it.

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Who wants to eat a casserole I would make?"

"Oh," she said, still with a funny look on her face, "I didn't mean it that way."

"I did," I said as forgiveness.