What I Ate in One Year: (and related thoughts)

by Stanley Tucci

Soup is life in a pot.

Aurelien had also made a salad dressing of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and honey.

Also made cannellini beans with chopped carrot, onion, celery, and sliced garlic.

The slower one becomes, the faster time moves. How? Why? Is it because we finally understand time and are now able to gauge how long we’ve got left? At the age of sixty-three I probably have another twenty years, thirty if I’m very lucky. But now, as opposed to when I was younger, I know what twenty years is. I know what thirty years is. They are nothing. Just a glimpse of life. So, one panics. Or I do. Therefore, I think of death often. Very often. Too often perhaps.

But I come by it honestly. Thoughts of death, my own and others’, have always been very present in my mind, since before Kate or I got ill.

Also, if one devotes as much time to one’s stomach as I do, it’s not a terrible idea to devote even a little bit of time to one’s heart and body as well.

In so many attempts to save time, so many other things are wasted.

When I did some cocktail videos during lockdown for my Instagram, one person commented very excitedly that I was wearing pants and a belt. Let’s face it: adults today dress like children. I’m not suggesting that one don a three-piece suit every day, but anything other than shorts, sneakers, and T-shirts plastered with oversize logos or catchphrases like “I used to drink, but that was hours ago,” or “Shit I don’t have time for” followed by a list of that “shit” would be a step in the right direction.

When the event ended, I hopped into a cab and headed home to be jeered at and taken advantage of by my children while I cooked yet another meal for them that they might deign to eat. I kept my name tag, printed with the royal seal, pinned to my lapel to impress them, or just as a visual prompt in case they had forgotten my name. When I arrived home, they weren’t impressed at all. And they kept calling me Mummy. Rabble.

I love a potato cooked in any way, shape, or form.

Why can’t we be like the yew tree, which has the capacity to live for thousands of years? There’s a yew in Scotland that is thought to be five thousand years old, still thriving and growing new shoots. I want everyone I love to be like that tree.

If that someone is interested, I would choose to remain forty years of age for a decade or so. At forty, one is mature; is experienced in both love and loss, success and failure; is probably not yet in need of eyeglasses; can still awaken in the morning and move through the day without joint pain and muscle aches; and has a memory that is still intact. At forty, one is not old; one has just reached the beginning of middle age and is on the cusp of becoming distinguished.

Why does gardening become a common pastime when people grow older? Is it because after years of dealing with humans it’s just easier to spend time with something that needs attention, gives sustenance, and enhances your world but doesn’t talk back? Possibly for some of us. And for others, maybe, when age creeps its way in, we innately feel the need to cultivate and encourage life, especially if that life is perennial, because ours, very much, is not.

Someday, I mused silently, someday you will come to understand the culinary lion who stands before you, and you will rue the day you declined even a crumb of the gustatory offerings from his generous, loving heart and his scarred, gifted hands. I was roused from my self-aggrandizing reverie by a tiny voice asking, “When’s Mummy coming home?” Philistines.