The Toasted Tomato

Yesterday, I turned 39. It wasn’t a birthday for the record books, I’ll tell you that for free, but it did prompt some useful reflection. And so I present: Things I’ve Learned in 39 Years:

• An air popcorn maker really does make the best popcorn. Plus the butter tray on top. Come on.
• Fish emulsion is the very best fertilizer for my garden, introduced to me by my friend Rick. Warning: it smells and looks exactly like it sounds. Mix it with water in an old water jug so it doesn’t stink up your bucket and doesn’t splash on your leg when you pour it. You don’t want that stuff on you.
• Watching a great movie, one that lets you re-evaluate, immerses you in art and makes you feel like maybe even you can produce some, is always a worthy way to spend your time. Best ones I’ve seen lately: “The Big Short,” “The Revenant,” “The Hateful Eight,” “Carol.”
• A lilac bush will make you happy every spring and remind you what the end of the school year smells like.
• Always freeze more strawberries than you think you should. And eat as many as you can with your stepdaughter when they’re in season.

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Well don’t I feel like a princess. I’m sitting upstairs in Gabrielle’s playroom at what is now my desk. I’ve got my pens. I’ve got my daytimer. I’ve got my dictionary. And post-it notes have started breeding on the wall in front of me.

I cannot believe just how happy this little space has made me in the past few weeks. It was discovered when we were having some work done to repair the ceiling in the basement. Normally, I work in the dining room, where I would have been exposed to a whole lot of noise as they worked. So I hauled my stuff up to the second floor, intending on working on the guestroom bed (yay, laptops).

But then I spied this beautiful white desk. Our plan had been to have Gabrielle use it as she was assigned more and more homework (which has happened). But we overlooked an essential element of teenagerdom: 16-year-olds don’t want to leave their bedroom for nothing. So while she’s worked at the little station in her room, this little wonder has sat empty.

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Today is my husband’s birthday and, as such, it will be a busy one in the kitchen. But I have all of my grocery shopping done, which is always such a cozy feeling, and now it’s just me, a humming oven and my cookbook.

This year, I’ve decided to up the ante on the birthday meal by using a French cookbook. And by French, I mean cuisine style as well as the language in which it’s written. We picked it up at our favorite restaurant in Montreal, Leméac, but so far it’s remained closed.

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A few weeks ago, I sat in the passenger seat of my little car and held on to my hat. Beside me sat my stepdaughter Gabrielle with her hands on the steering wheel, looking like she was about to burst. It was her first lesson in learning how to drive standard and we were in the parking lot of a nearby golf course.

“OK, now as you lift up — easy does it — on the clutch, you press on the accelerator,” I said, mimicking the movement with my hands to underscore the point.

“See what I’m doing here?” I added, performing the movement again, looking like a confused traffic cop.

She looked over politely, though I could see the thought surfacing in her I-scored-a-32-on-the-ACT-while-still-a-freshman head: “Relax, old lady. I got this.”

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It’s been four weeks since you’ve been dumped, and you’ve managed to hold on to your pride and not call him. And then, on a sunny day so innocent it might have been invented by Anne of Green Gables, he calls you. Out of the blue, after senior yearbooks have been passed out, inside of which is a photo of you looking slim, fine and glossy in your graduation dress. You are proud of that picture. You will continue to be proud of it 21 years later.

So you chat on the phone and you are exactly as you planned to be: casual, light-hearted, a cool girl, no biggie. You are funny and punny. He seems happy to chat for an hour. You get off the phone and in the quiet of your room, pump your fist in silent, ecstatic victory.

At this point, things can go in two opposing directions.

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So you’ve been dumped. It’s been 24 hours, almost 25, and you’ve managed by the skin of your teeth not to do anything about it. Not to mail out the long letter that you have written on the pages of your notebook, the cover of which has a picture of two elderly people holding hands as they walk into the ocean nude, the same two people you imagined would be yourself and your love in 65, make it 100, years.

You have not called him, though you have picked up the receiver 742 times and have made 312 half-dials of his phone number.

You haven’t driven past his house, not because it seems like an unreasonable thing to do to you, but because it might seem weird to this person if they randomly looked outside and saw you parked there with googly eyes and lips sometimes agape, sometimes mouthing a silent plea.

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Twenty-one years, folks. Twenty-one years, eight months, six weeks, four days, two hours. In that time, nearly 11 years of column writing. Magazine and newspaper articles. A book. Short stories. And it’s only just now I feel recovered enough to write about the subject of all subjects: the breakup.

Oh, to get dumped. Even that expression, the idea of a person getting so discarded by another that they end up in a place where snotty Kleenexes mash with slimy banana peels, it makes me wince. There is nothing worse in the world of love, is there? I mean, death, I guess death is worse, but when you’re in the midst of a breakup, there is a part of you that thinks death might not be. That if you died or the person who broke your heart died, you’d at least not have been told they don’t like you anymore.

But after you’ve been told that, after that stunning moment when the world starts moving in slow-mo and your vocabulary is reduced to monosyllables, the most readily available of which is “noooooooooo,” several interesting things occur.

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Of all the errands in the history of errands, my very least favorite is going to the bank. You can tell me to find a flapper for the toilet at Lowe’s. You can tell me to bring a pile of shirts to the drycleaners. You can even make me take old paint cans to the solid waste department on sanitation day (actually I like doing this). Just please, please don’t ask me to deposit a check.

My dislike stems from childhood, when I used to love going to the bank with my mom. Almost every few days, there we were stopping at the old Canada Trust at the corner of Portage and Cavalier.

Making the stop so sweet was Margie, a bank teller who always seemed genuinely happy to see me. She’d let my mom prop me up on top of the tangerine counter — the Canada Trust décor had a stunning orange and brown color scheme — and there my mom would busily fill in little pieces of paper that were called slips. I loved the sound of the pen moving quickly, the plastic laminate counter a good vehicle for conveying the tempo of her scribble. Then, while my mom was digging for her bank book, Margie and I would catch up.

Before our conversation even started, two important things had already occurred: I was allowed to sit on a precarious perch in public, and I was allowed to call an adult by their first name.

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Yep, it’s car maintenance time and that means I’m sitting in a waiting room on a burgundy pleather banquette with Fox News and a coffee pot for company. My husband’s front passenger tire has a nail in it, so I had to go to the nearest place possible: a place called Big O, whose name, I think we’ll all agree, is begging for explanation.

So far, my visit has entailed talking to a cologny, possibly fake-baked mechanic who has called me “honey” three times, something that might cause my feminist sisters to wince but something I quite enjoyed.

I’m a complete dolt when it comes to anything having to do with cars. In fact, the extent of my ability is getting the car to the shop. Once there, I am reduced to monosyllable answers, the most common of which is “Ummm.” Luckily, the guy today knew what year my car is at first glance, which I was thankful for since that information flew out of my head as soon as I heard the Led Zeppelin streaming from the oil-scented garage.

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Over the years, as my 20s have graduated into my late 30s, what comes churning out of my kitchen has changed. Gone are the days where I made homemade fettuccine alfredo, with its luscious butter, cream and Parmesan, on a monthly basis. Gone too are regular perogy dinners and every recipe, no matter how three-cheesy, out of my potato cookbook.

Now, a whole lot of veggies fill my cart every week. Heck — and not to sound like a jerk — sometimes I don’t even leave the produce section. Instead of French sauces and red meat everything, Asian and Latin meals have become staples in our house. And eggs. We eat a stupid amount of eggs.

But on Sunday, Valentine’s Day, it was time to indulge.

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