On covert acts & substituting the word hamburger for grief

Nov 05, 2023

Dear daughters,

I’m standing at the sink eating the last five strawberries. Urgently, greedily. They could be used for someone’s lunch, I think. But the thought is too slow. It’s like a turtle. I can eat much faster than that thought. I can cut the stems off the strawberries and shove the strawberries into my mouth 10x, 100x faster…than the thought. I’m in the middle of a covert act where I must eliminate all the evidence. Leaving a single strawberry is not an option.

On the other hand a thought doesn’t have to be fast for the body to understand the repercussions. Have you noticed that? In this case, I won’t be able to fill Violet’s lunchbox compartments (of which there are six) with a red fruit now. I have consumed the red fruit. There will be a green fruit, a green vegetable and an orange vegetable. But no red fruit. I will have to scour the kitchen for other items.

My body knows that I am choosing pleasure at the sink for myself instead of the motherly pleasure of filling all six compartments with different coloured fruits and vegetables.

Dear daughters, I hope you do this too one day: stand at the sink and eat all the red fruit. Even if it costs you something.

This hopeful dahlia. Simon used to grow dahlias for competitions and he said that a competition flower is the size of a basketball. This is not a competition dahlia, but it’s still nice.

Theatre Camp—a mockumentary about an intensive performing arts camp directed by Molly Gordon, who played Claire inThe Bear (Carmy’s much under-utilized girlfriend). Here’s she shows all her chops and brought me right back to theatre school! I laughed out loud a few times. So did Simon. (Elsie did not laugh, but she said she liked it. Small wins, people.)

The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, Winner of the 2023 Trillium Book Award. Every time the poet gets close to his feeling of sadness, he deflects with the word hamburger.