Wrinkles and a really good sandwich

I’m lying in bed with a sheet mask on my face. It feels like wet rice paper, translucent white and limp. It folded on itself as I was putting it on, just like rice paper does after it’s dipped in water. I carefully pull it apart, like I do before laying sliced vegetables across the middle of rice paper and rolling it up into a salad roll. The mask is billed as a ‘replenishing treatment for compromised skin.’ I shouldn’t take it personally that it was given to me. I’ve skied a lot this month in sub zero temperatures. My face has taken a beating. I’m over 50. My skin is moody, dry, falling, and angry. So I smooth the wrinkles and folds of the mask with my fingers hoping to spread all those healing properties into my skin. It’s a wet and slimy exercise, but I feel nourished, just like I do when eating salad rolls.

I smooth the bedding around me, like I’ve done with my face. It’s crumpled, the way sheets are when you’ve spent too much time in bed. I’ve been sick with a cold these past few days and this seems like the best place to be. Reading is too much, so instead my laptop and various streaming services have kept me company. I started with Shrinking, the series where Jason Segel and Harrison Ford play therapists wrestling with their own grief. I notice that Segel’s character Jimmy wears frumpy clothes, designed, I’m assuming, to mimic his depressed state. There are loose ties and crumpled, shapeless blazers. Untucked shirts and general bedragglement. I’m not sure if I can take it right now, my head is too congested. I switch to Slow Horses, a series about a group of British Intelligence agents who have failed in their jobs, but not badly enough to get sacked. The chief reject is Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman. Lamb sleeps in his clothes. His hair is stringy. There are holes in his socks. A bottle of whiskey rolls around on his putrid, cigarette burned office carpet. You can smell him through the screen. But Lamb’s crumpled state seems to work grey London is the backdrop, versus the sweet sun of Jimmy’s Los Angeles. Either way both characters make me want to get up and wash my hair.

But I can’t. Our furnace is broken and we don’t have hot water. So instead I smooth my covers and sink down, deeper.

My second cygnet¹ comes into the room. He’s really here to visit the yellow lab at my feet, but I’ll take it. The two wrestle on the bed then settle in for a cuddle. Puffs of fur dance in the midday sun streaming through the window. I realize now that I’m hungry. This is a good sign; I’m getting better. I ask my son if he could please make me a sandwich. I’ve watched him these past few years, stacking ingredients between slices of sourdough, spinning the plate to find its best angle, then snapping a photo. He doesn’t mess around. Sure, he says, and slides off the bed.

He makes me a Cuban, grilled in the old George Foreman,² and serves it with a side of sliced apple. Inside is spicy mustard, sharp cheddar, dill pickles and shaved ham from the butcher. There are moments in life when you realize that all is smooth, right and uncrumpled in the world, and this is one of them. I eat it in my bed then take a nap.

1. I wrote about the cygnets in Mediations in Kitchen a few weeks ago. The boys are really cobs now, but cygnets sounds right.

2. And this story, Noah’s Panini Press, written this time two years ago, shares the story of our George Foreman grill. Thank you Noah.