The other night, the topic of TV dinners came up. For those of you young enough (or fortunate enough) not to remember them (or to have eaten them), here's a primer: TV dinners were frozen meals consisting of a meat (turkey, fried chicken, Salisbury steak), two soporific starches like peas and mashed potatoes with a little puddle of brown gravy in the center, and a few excruciatingly sweet bites of cobbler.
Everything nested separately in a divided tin platter that went from oven to table in 25 minutes. They were greasy, salty approximations of real, home-cooked food, and my mother only served them on the occasional Sunday night when she had exhausted her repertoire of breaded veal cutlets, grilled steaks, hamburger and spinach casserole, spaghetti with meatballs, and chicken five ways.
I liked TV dinners when I was 8 years old. Now I eschew pretty much any food that comes in a box and goes from oven to plate without some sort of fuss. Which is unfortunate, because lately, I find myself unable to cook much. I no longer pore over recipes, adapting them on the fly to what I have on hand. I rarely rummage through the refrigerator and freezer in a quest for soup candidates. My enjoyment of cooking is one of the daily casualties of the pandemic. Now it's all I can do to shove a few potatoes in the oven, shake out a bag of pre-halved Brussels sprouts onto an oiled pan, and then forget about all of it until I smell fire or my husband asks, in a small, hungry voice, 'What's for dinner?"
There are other casualties of the pandemic too. Daily showers, for example.
"It's not like I'm around anyone," I'll say to my husband, at which time he'll give me a little wave and say, "Hello, I'm someone." And I've all but forgotten why hair care was ever important. I did finally snip off a few dry millimeters of my waist-length locks this past week, which I instantly regretted for no reason I can pinpoint. I spend hours at my desk every day, in a desperate attempt to inch toward a fully realized piece of writing. But my concentration is shot through with holes. Sleep has also been a casualty, as has wakefulness. I am not sure how both of these things are true, except that one feels like the other and neither abides by a schedule.
I am frustrated by my breathtaking loss of control. Those of us who like to believe we are capable of bending circumstances to our liking are all frustrated. My husband, who is just like me, only more so, is a good example. Years ago, when we lived on a farm, he tried to force our watermelon vines to grow in a straight line. I watched him one afternoon from the kitchen window gently untangling the vines, then laying them out in long rows. As I recall, by the next morning the vines were climbing all over one another in a fevered attempt to defy order and to reassert their will as watermelons.
Maybe it was the same afternoon as the watermelon rebellion that we took a walk through our pasture, stopping to pick and nibble on the wild blackberries exploding from the fence line. There were loads of them, and we laughed as our little dog Shark ate the ripest ones off the vines near to the ground.
What happened next would go down in the annals of our shared history as a further lesson in letting go. In a scene that will forever unfold in slo-mo in my head, my husband pulled a handsome blackberry from a tall vine. He showed it to me, smiled broadly, then went to pop it into his mouth. But he fumbled it, and the blackberry shot up into the air. Rather than letting it fall to the ground, he smashed his hand to his chest, detonating the berry against his gleaming white Banana Republic T-shirt.
It was a knee-jerk reaction, and anyone would have done the same thing. But it got us thinking about how so many of our attempts to exert control are knee-jerk reactions. It takes thought to let the berries fall.
These days we take turns, my husband and I, reminding each other that we are living in exceptional times. That it's not surprising we don't feel like doing what used to bring us joy. That it's OK if our focus is compromised right now. Most everyone we talk to, and others we hear about through the news or social media, is feeling unsettled, uncertain, decentered and out of control. So we'd better get comfortable with chaos. Because from what I can tell, no amount of vine straightening or berry wrangling is going to make a difference.
Respond to this column at dana@danashavin.com and follow on Facebook at Dana Shavin Writes. Her memoir, "The Body Tourist," about the intersection of her anorexia with her mental health career, is available on Amazon.