Sabbath Meals

Balabusta's Shabbat meals 2/25 and 2/26/04

I think my meals are getting increasingly boring. What was the factor that kept things experimental and edgy for so long? Oh yeah, my husband used to cook more! He always wanted to make Indian food. Hey I remember before I even met him, I used to make crazily elaborate ethnic menus from Sundays at Moosewood and other cookbooks. Now it feels like I have nothing worth blogging about, even though the food is still pretty tasty.

This week we had a potluck on Friday night and I made a dish from the Millenium Cookbook called Tamale Torte with Black Bean Chili. I had made it once before, but didn't have the right kind of corn meal. The recipe calls for Masa Harina, so I bought a whole huge bag of it. (Supposedly it is a simple matter to learn to make one's own corn tortillas. Ah yes, Ashkenazi Jewish women from the midwestern United States can learn to slap together tortillas in a good 15-20 minutes. Can you spell cultural appropriation, I knew you could.) Anyway I made the torte recalling the famous MFK Fisher story in The Gastronomical Me in which a tamale pie made her cry for several hours.

...the tamale pie was very good indeed. It was probably one of the best that has ever been made, anywhere in the world where anyone would bother to make one, and I hope it was the only one I shall ever eat. Of course it was not the concoction itself that broke my spiritual back. I know that well. But a little while after I finished ieating it (I should say well within the four-hour period of a more or less normal digestion), I began to cry. It was the first time Al had even seen a tear in either of my eyes. Now there were thousands. They fell down my cheeks without a sound or a sign from me...

I thought "Ah, that's why they called it a torte, not a pie." My friend who is vegan who was eating at the potluck was delighted by the torte--both by its lack of dairy products and by its taste.

But I was nevertheless quite sick to my stomach for the next day. I think not from the torte, maybe something I caught from the baby who was sick last week. But even so, I don't think I can eat any of the leftover torte. I barely ate anything from the whole menu of stand-bys that I made for Saturday lunch:

Challah
Lentil Soup with a Hint of Fruit from Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven
Spinach salad with organic blood oranges and cucumbers
Broccoli, Carrot and Cauliflower Kugel with wheat germ crust
Baked tempeh in sesame-ginger marinade

I was trying to create a vegetarian menu that is high in accessible iron. The lentil soup is made with dried apricots. I did it in the crockpot so it was no work at all. I had some this evening and it is pretty good.

I made the kugel by combining three or four recipes. (Should there be a word for that?) It was mayonaise + 3 eggs+6 tablespoons of flour+baking powder to bind together the grated raw carrot and the cooked, mashed up cauliflower and broccoli, plus tamari and black pepper, plus the wheat germ.

The most exciting (and not nauseating) thing on the menu was the salad, which was a reflection of my husband's procurement abilities.

I'm going to scheme and plot this week and I'll let you know if I come up with anything more exciting.

Some thoughts on kugel

I think I began to identify as a feminist at around the same age as I decided to learn how to cook--around ten or eleven years old. Feminism and cooking...you wouldn't think they would go together, but so often they do. Perhaps because so many women cook?

I was not looking for a good definition of kugel when I read Rachel Adler's 1998 book, Engendering Judaism.  This passage (from Adler's introduction to her book)  on cooking as metaphor for feminist theology actually changed my cooking as cooking!

The Shit Method: A Grandmotherly Heuristic

Eastern European Jewish grandmothers used to joke that they cooked by the “shit” method: men shit arein a bissel mehl, men shit arein a bissel zukker…(You throw in a little flour, you throw in a little sugar…). The joke rests on a bilingual pun—the Yiddish word shit, through, is in fact cognate to the Ango-Saxon root that provides English with its oldest, baldest word for excrement. The joke is, on one level, self-deprecating. In comparison to the precise measurements and ingredients lists of American cookbooks, says bubbe, my methods are haphazard, messy, and worthless. On another level, grandma’s naivete is an ironic con. I haven’t got a cooking method at all, she says. This delicious result? I just threw some stuff in the direction of the pot.

In reality, the "shit" method has has little to do with dumb luck. It is a carefully crafted heuristic originally designed for cooking in environments where resources are scarce and undependable. Take a kugel, for example. Kugel can be made with noodles, potatoes, rice or matzah or even with yams or zucchini. If sugar and raisins are available, kugel can be sweet. If there are only onions, kugel can be savory. If eggs are plentiful, a kugel can be almost as light as a soufflé. If scarce, it can be flat and substantial.

Yet a kugel is neither a hodgepodge nor a culinary masquerade like mock duck made of tofu. A rice kugel is not a mock potato kugel, but a rice kugel. The true measure of the practitioner’s skill is not how ingeniously she disguises what is there or compensates for what is lacking, but how well she chooses and honors the resources at hand. That is what makes the “shit” method as adaptable to plenitude as it is to dearth.

My mom didn't make a lot of kugel when I was growing up, because she was almost always on a diet, and neither Weight Watchers nor the Diet Workshop featured recipes for low-calorie kugel. (Low calorie kugel! Bwa ha ha ha! Not only is the whole concept hilarious, I am envisioning a lot of new hits from people looking for recipes for it! Sorry. Try the Jewish-food.org recipe archives--here is the kugel page.) My grandmother, who was raised in German, not Yiddish, in the United States, not Eastern Europe, never said "shit." So my kugel skills were necessarily limited.
The first time I tried to make a kugel, in college, it was terrible. I put in both sour cream and cottage cheese, and it was bland to the point of being quite disgusting.

At some point around 1990, I had a boyfriend who was extremely excited that I could make a kugel. I followed a Mollie Katzen recipe for noodle kugel. It called for pitted prunes and I used prunes with the pits still in them, which I think is a faux pas, don't you? He liked it anyway. I guess sweet noodle kugel had some strong associations for him! It was not a long-lived relationship, but I learned a lot from it.

My husband won my heart with his cooking, among other things. Really it was watching the careful way he poured the vinegar for salad dressing that did it for me. But he makes a great variation on his mom's savory noodle kugel, with spinach or zucchini. I like the way he combines precision and ritual with improvisation. He always makes the kugel with the same proportions, except he doesn't measure the seasonings so it's always a bit different.

Here is the spinach kugel recipe I have been making lately. I have been using frozen organic spinach, but of course you can use fresh.

two 10 oz. packages frozen chopped organic spinach
one onion
2 tablespoons olive oil
three eggs
1/2 cup Vegenaise
1/2 cup (roughly) wheat germ
Earth Balance margarine

Thaw the spinach. If it's the kind that comes in boil in a bag pouches, immerse the pouches in warm water until the spinach is liquid in the bags. (Why organic? Because conventionally grown spinach is very high in pesticide residues.)

Chop the onion and fry it in olive oil on low heat until it is very brown. You want it to be sweet.

Beat the eggs into the Vegenaise with a wire whisk to make a custard. You might have to mix it for a few minutes to get it to blend in without curdling. (I like the taste of Vegenaise.)

Mix the spinach and the onion into the eggy custardy gloop. Season it with salt or tamari and black pepper to taste. Generously grease your kugel pan with Earth Balance. (if you are serving a dairy meal you could use butter instead.) Sprinkle the bottom of the pan with wheat germ. Dump the spinach glop into the prepared pan. Sprinkle the top of the glop with wheat germ until it has a nice coating of wheat germ. Put little lumps of Earth Balance on top. Bake this in a 350 degree oven for 45-60 minutes, or until the kugel is firm and the top is nicely brown but not burnt.

MFK Fisher on eating and grief

When I was writing from my parents' house, I mentioned something MFK Fisher wrote about hunger and grief. I found my copy of The Art of Eating, a compilation of five of her most popular books, and found the passage in her book An Alphabet for Gourmets:

It is as if our bodies, wiser than we who wear them, call out for encouragement and strength and, inspite of us and of the patterns of proper behavior we have learned, compel us to answer, and to eat.

More often than not, in such compulsory feastings, we eat enormously, and that too is good, for we are stupefying ourselves, anesthetizing our overwrought nerves with a heavy dose of proteins, and our bodies will grow sleepy with digestion and let us rest a little after the long vigil.

This is a little cleverer than what ran through my head looking at all those platters of fish and essen, essen essen. You know that Mary Frances knew what she was talking about.

Balabusta's Shabbat meals 2/18 and 2/19/04

This past Wednesday was my husband's birthday. I wanted to make a cake, but I knew that he was going to be out tutoring bar mitzvah students in the evening, so we instead invited people to our house for Shabbat lunch. Our friends decided to make us lunch. (We almost never go out for Shabbat meals because of our zealous fanaticism about our son's sleep.) So I made Friday night dinner and our friend D. made most Saturday lunch. I contributed the cake, the challah and some soup.

For Friday night I made:

baked tofu (this was a sesame ginger one, with black sesame seeds)
roasted cauliflower with shallots
noodle and spinach kugel
Peter Reinhart's challah recipe (plus 3 tablepoons of sugar!)

Are you noticing that I keep making the same food? I am starting to think that blogging is not good for my creativity. The food was great though.

I succeeded with the Reinhart all-white-flour challah again, big time. I liked my braids, I got them fatter in the middle and tapered on the ends. There was none left for making French toast. Our family ate the first loaf and the Saturday lunch guests ate up the second.

The kugel I basically invented on the spot, it was very eggy. I had made another recipe (for the cake, below) that called for three egg whites, and the Reinhart challah calls for brushing the tops of the challah with two beaten whites. Of course you never use up the white on the challah, but there is still some left. So I made the kugel with one whole egg, three yolks and what was left of the egg white from the challah--a LOT of egg. I also used a 1lb. package of skinny egg noodles, a 10 oz. package of frozen organic spinach, a chopped carmelized onion, tamari, black pepper, and wheat germ for the top. It was, unsurprisingly, very good, being so rich.

For lunch, D. made and carted to our house in a shopping cart:

Spinach salad with "smashed" radishes (marinated and sooooo delicious)
puréed squash with ginger, molasses and roasted garlic
strata with tofu, peppers, spinach and some other stuff
roasted eggplant spread
baked bananas in chai

I love D.'s salads, they are always so creative and wonderful. He is a great cook. Unfortunately, the strata--a kind of bread pudding-- got burnt, but fortunately, it tasted good anyway. The bananas were not successful--he used red bananas and therefore couldn't tell that they were quite underripe. They were as astringent as unripe persimmons. Let that be a lesson to us all!

I made a soup in the crockpot out of black beans, french lentils, sundried tomatoes, carmelized onion, and a small piece of chipotle pepper with some adobo sauce. I also put a piece of kombu (that's kelp) and a dried Chinese mushroom in the water to help give the soup some  umami flavor. I know my husband doesn't like mushrooms so I fished it out. I though it was an exceptionally good soup, but it wasn't salty enough.

I also made a birthday cake from a recipe in the My Most Favorite Dessert Company cookbook by Doris Schechter. It was fun to make the cake with my electric mixer--in the past I have mainly made cakes by hand, but I have been using the mixer more often lately to make baking easier with my toddler guy. The best part was making an Italian meringue. I set up the eggwhites, started making the sugar syrup--as soon as the syrup was hot, turned on the mixer--and when the syrup was 150 degrees, poured it into the whirling eggwhites. I got meringue everywhere, but it was totally interesting and fun. As enjoyable as it was to make, the cake was disappointing. I saw that Mrs. Schechter usually tells the reader to pour orange syrup over the cake before icing it, but I didn't take the extra step, and the cake was somewhat dry. The icing, which looked beautiful, tasted strongly of the Earth Balance shortening I used to make it. The chocolate, vanilla and sugar in it were not sufficient to drown out the echo of insipid shortening taste, even though I used the wonderful Green and Black's Maya Gold chocolate. It was good cake, just not as good as I had hoped.

I actually prefer the vegan chocolate ganache in the Millenium restaurant cookbook, which is just a ton of chocolate melted into soymilk. Soymilk ganache has the best flavor of any frosting, but it's also really melty so you can't frost the cake in advance. Another good non-dairy frosting I have made was in Recipes from an Ecological Kitchen, it was carob, maple syrup and almond butter, whirled in the food processor. It made a glossy and beautiful icing, but was nearly as messy as the gobs of meringue I had to get off of everything.

In the end there were nine adults around the table, three of whom came for dessert only. Part of our conversation was about dreams. It was pleasant and relaxed and I felt like some people got to know each other better.

Hostess aprons

We are leaving my parents' house this evening; my son is having his afternoon nap. This morning my mom took my husband and me over to my grandmother's apartment. Whenever there is a death, you have to deal with the person's stuff. My grandmother had recently moved to assisted living so she had sent some of her things to my sister and me while she was still alive.

We considered taking a silver chafing dish, just because chafing dishes are so neat. Of course we mainly entertain on Shabbat so a chafing dish would be impractical...even if it were somehow at all practical by nature, which it isn't.

My mom opened a drawer where my grandmother had some embroidered linen tablecloths and napkins. She started to go through them. We found a "hostess apron." I remembered my grandmother putting it around her waist and doing a kind of silly pantomime of wearing it. There was some fashion for hostesses to wear these gauzy, embroidered half-aprons at fancy parties. In a world where such an item was de rigeur for entertaining, I certainly would never have had a guest!  But my grandmother had several such aprons. I never saw her wear one for real.

Sometime maybe I'll put up the one recipe I have from her, for macaroni and cheese casserole. It was actually a really special one that she used to serve to break the fast on Yom Kippur. I hope we will find other ones, but I don't think that was her focus.

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Shivah Food

I want to thank people who came to the blog to leave condolences. I'm not sure I'm supposed to thank you, though. I keep having this problem while we're sitting Shivah. You aren't supposed to greet people, are you supposed to thank them? The whole issue of halachah and mourning is tricky for me.

Technically grandchildren are not avelim (official mourners, including siblings, children, spouses or parents) and so we were in this weird situation. I delivered a hesped (a eulogy) based largely on the structure of my last post here, but with a lot more details of my grandmother's life. People praised what I said a lot, which I found hard to take. I didn't feel like I did justice to my grandmother, who was after all 95 years old and who did many private or secret deeds of loving-kindness. I was going to mention a few of them but my sister told me that my grandmother wouldn't have wanted that, and besides that there are still people who might be embarassed. My sister was closer with my grandma and is a little bit more on her wavelength about privacy. My sister was crying hard and steadily through everything, but I have been pretty numb. Every so often the reality of not having this major person in my life anymore breaks through.

My best high school friend came to the funeral. She lost her grandmother last year, and she had a very close relationship with her. It was really good for there to be someone at the funeral who understood that as fortunate, as lucky, as it is to have a grandmother into adulthood whom you love and respect, it still feels lousy to lose them.

Even though my sister and I aren't avelot, the people who came back to our house after the funeral sat us down and fed us with my dad and my great uncle. (My uncle is the youngest of seven children, my grandmother was his last living sibling.) My husband led the evening service when we got back, but then my dad wasn't interested in praying anymore.

My dad has lost patience with prayer as he has gotten older. He and my mom were both raised Reform by parents who had been raised Orthodox. Our house growing up was observant and Reform, in a way that most people don't experience. As they have gotten older, my mom has become increasingly observant and my dad increasingly unwilling to follow halachah. I think this is a common pattern, especially the part of it when my mom tries to pretend that we always did things this way! My mom also opposed my taking on more traditional observance of Shabbat when I first did it. It made her mad that I was establishing a separate identity as an adult. I am glad that I am anonymous on this blog so I can say that in a public place. Anyway that has made sitting shivah a very peculiar experience.

Every time anyone offers to send us a meal, my mom tells them we keep kosher and not to send trays from places without kosher supervision. She asked for all meals to be pareve, because my husband and I are vegetarians who very occasionally eat fish. We got huge honking enormous platters of fish. That's normal shivah food anyway. If you aren't Jewish you probably don't know that instead of sending flowers to a Jewish mourner, people typically send trays and baskets and containers and shopping bags of food. When my father-in-law died, we got vats of vegetarian soup from his and my mother-in-law's friends in the Jewish community. This time we got trays and meals from all the kosher restaurants in this town, and there are many. 

I think we have had probably a whole salmon's worth of lox, plus buckets of pickled herring, creamed herring, richly mayonaised tuna salad with egg and chopped celery, smoked sable, cream cheese, Tofutti cream cheese substitute, butter, and hundreds of bagels, a basket of fruit, two platters of cut fruit, three trays of cookies. Oh the cookies: the Russian tea biscuits and the rugelach, the brownies, the pieces of halvah, the congo bars, the lemon eclairs,  and those  pastries some  people call "spitz"--cake with white goo covered with chocolate. Also my father's first cousin made us coated walnuts (ironic, as my grandmother was allergic to them.) Wait I also forgot that we got a whole meal of Israeli fried things: vegetarian kubeh, vegetarian Moroccan cigars filled with cumin-y meat substitute or potato, three kinds of borekas (mushroom, potato and spinach) felafel and humus, and soft fresh loaves of pita. Another friend brought homemade stuffed grape leaves. Also one relative sent a Friday night dinner of grilled salmon in sauce, with garlicky broccolini, rice pilaf, a portobello appetizer, french bread and one other thing I'm forgetting. In fact I'm sure I've forgotten a few things.

Each platter was supposed to serve 6-8 people but really there was enough for dozens of hearty eaters. There's this whole ettiquette thing, that mourners aren't supposed to serve people who come to comfort them, and that non-mourners aren't supposed to eat. It's really a good thing that a lot of people observe that one in the breach.

Many people in mourning put on ten pounds during shivah. It is an orgy of food. If you are like me, you could completely stuff your feelings down. Instead of even noticing that you are grieving, you could eat your way to a nap, and then wake up and eat some more. So it's actually not too bad that my dad isn't sitting in a traditional way, and that my mom took me to my grandmother's apartment in the assisted living place on Friday. I hadn't seen this apartment since my grandmother moved into it. My mom had moved as much of my grandmother's furniture as would fit the smaller space. The living room still smelled of my grandmother's perfume and looked like her living room always looked. I felt like the wind was knocked out of me, the profound lack of my grandmother in her house.

In the meantime my little two year old son is being so adorable and funny that it is distracting everyone. He sits at the table and eats the organic apples I made my mom buy for us, or pasta with tomato sauce, or all the tomatoes off of a deli platter, and everyone coos.

zechut

My grandmother passed away this morning. She was 95 years old and she had congestive heart failure and pneumonia, but somehow we still thought she might make it. She had an incredible resilience.  After Saturday it became increasingly clear that she was not going to be able to survive this illness.

I have been meditating on the different meanings of the Hebrew word zechut. One meaning is merit. In the previous post I discussed the idea that my grandmother had the merit of longevity because she took care of her parents. Both her mother and her father-in-law came to live with her and my grandfather. My mom always translated this concept in Judaism to "mitzvah points in heaven." Once a graduate school acquaintance told me I had zechut for keeping shabbat at an academic conference. I simultaneously find this a theologically troubling concept and, uh, kind of believe in it. (So sue me. It's not the only idea that I think is terrible but nevertheless believe.)

Another meaning for zechut is privilege. Once I met a feminist scholar in Israel who said of one of my professors, Zeh zechut l'hakir otah, It's a privilege to know her.  Of course now I'm thinking about this in relation to my grandmother. I do feel that we had a tremendous privilege. Especially as she lived so long. I was very lucky. I never really felt that she and I had a lot in common--well, sense of humor, but not interests or style. She was very interested in clothes and her appearance, and liked to go out on the town. I like books and I'm kind of boring compared to my grandma's high style at my age. But when I became pregnant we found something great and profound to share. I liked to talk with her every morning on the way to work, to tell her about my pregnancy and about the baby, and to hear her extremely fond memories of my dad as a baby sixty-some-odd years ago.

Another meaning of the word is right, as in human right. In the course of my studies, I learned about a feminist organization in the Yishuv, the Zionist settlement of Palestine before the state of Israel. They called themselves the Equal  Rights Association, in Hebrew Shivui Zichuyot. (I don't have any of the stuff in front of me so I hope I didn't misremember the name.) I can't relate the idea of equal rights to my grandmother very strongly. Though she seemed to approve of my interest in feminism, she wasn't really a feminist herself. She did like to tell me that she thought her mother would rather have been a career woman than the mother of seven children she actually was. The ideas of human rights that are a part of the colloquial ideas of American patriotism though, she was for those. As a first-generation American, she liked to use the phrase "free country."

About my son she said, "This is his America."

The last connotation I have for zechut is from Pirkei Avot, Provide for yourself a teacher and get yourself a friend; and judge every man towards merit. (Or, a better translation might be : judge every person favorably.) I suppose this merit is related to the first one, the one that results in reward.  My grandmother had a lot of tact. I don't know whether she judged everyone favorably, but she liked to let them think she did.

I don't have any more thoughts to tie this up, unfortunately. I have been reading through stacks of old papers here at my parents' house. I was a prolific writer at age 16 and 17. Everything always tied up neatly, as though poems and short stories were legal arguments. I can also see the origins of my weird 19th century diction in writing from 20 years ago. Perhaps with these few readers I can commit to finishing and publishing things that are not argued through to the end. We're all just sad here.

Balabusta's Thursday and Shabbat meals, 2/3/04-2/5/04

As I wrote, my husband, son and I are spending the weekend visiting my parents in honor of my son's second birthday. The main purpose of the trip was to visit my paternal grandmother, who is 95. We didn't know when we made the plans that my grandma was going to get sick and be hospitalized. She has pneumonia. The first thing my mom had me do when I got in was bake a birthday cake, even though we were there to see my grandma. As soon as the cake was done, we went to the hospital.  When we arrived there, her blood pressure, which had been dangerously low, went back up, and she  visited with everyone with an excited version of her normal lucid, charming way.

She is such a beautiful woman, even in a hospital johnny, even with tubes in her nose. Her eyes are still large and full of expression; her eyebrows, though gray and sparse, still animate her face.

I don't have my copy of her book here with me, but I remember that the food writer M.F.K Fisher has a piece on grief and the need of grieving people for food. We were all simultaneously relieved and stressed out by the hospital visit, and my parents hadn't really thought about food. We persuaded them to take us to a Chinese restaurant, where we had vegetarian moo shoo pancakes and tofu and green beans and some other veggie dishes. My parents, who are always on diets, ate everything on the table. My son, who is two after all and could legitimately be picky, also had a little of everything. We went back to my parents' house to eat the birthday cake--I made the Claudia Roden apple cake. My grandmother had saved the wooden bird-shaped birthday candle holders from my father's childhood, and we put those on the cake. My son refused to eat cake. After all that!  He asked for a pear and ate a lot of that. I pressed a tiny piece of cake on him, and he poured his glass of water over it. He just didn't get it!

On Friday, we went back to the hospital in the morning. My grandma had been restrained on one side with a wrist cuff and was having a breathing treatment with a mask over her face. She was getting freaked out and was trying to pull out her IVs. We talked a bit and she calmed down. She seemed to be improving, if uncomfortable. I started to feel a bit more hopeful.

We went home for lunch and to give the baby a nap, and I made some chard with chickpeas and a cauliflower curry. My husband made rice pilaf, and my mom made baked potatoes and salmon. We went back Friday afternoon, and my grandma was feeling good. She made jokes, flexing her biceps and kidding around about how the nurses didn't know what they were saying when they told her she needed to get back to normal!

On Friday evening, probably while we were eating our dinner, the house doctor decided to give my grandma Haldol because she was disoriented and delirious. I don't know why they do this at this hospital, but my grandma always has a bad reaction to this drug, it makes her hallucinate and act demented. The hospital staff called my father, who went to sit with my grandma all night. She stopped being able to recognize him. This was probably not because of the Haldol. My mom came back from the hospital and we were all keyed up and unable to  cope. The last time she was in this hospital I upset my parents by yelling at them not to let the staff give her Haldol.

In the morning my mom and I went for a walk with the baby, and while we were out the hospital called to tell my dad that my grandmother was not breathing and that we should come as soon as possible. I decided to break Shabbat by riding in the car to the hospital. I guess I'm sort of a ba'alat tshuvah --I don't usually think of myself that way--and I generally wouldn't do this.  I wasn't sure if I didn't go whether I would see my grandma again. My grandmother could just barely talk. She was restrained again, but she was able to hear me and respond. I  said "I love you" and she said "I love you twice as much" which is what she always tells my sister and me on the phone. 

This was not an ordinary Shabbat and these weren't ordinary meals. We had lunch in the hospital cafeteria, with some friendly strangers who flirted with the baby. I wish I had figured out a better way to negotiate halachah today. The reward for honoring your parents is supposed to be long life. I guess my grandma is an example of this. My grandmother had both her mother and her father-in-law living with her in her house when she was an adult. Even though she had a complicated relationship with her mom, she still took her in. Or maybe my grandmother's fight is why she has made it to this age. Apparently she was admitted to the hospital, she made jokes as they put on her hospital gown about modelling for Victoria's Secret. She is so terrified of doctors and hospitals and always has been. I heard her cursing herself for being sick in her delirium, "Darn me! Darn me!"

It disgusts me and appalls me that when someone lives her life with so much dignity, so much decorum, that she should be tied down to her bed in the hospital. I see that there is no alternative but something inside me rebels.