In a few hours, I will be on kitchen clean-up duty. We’ve pretty well divided the cooking/cleaning labor in the household, so whereas I’m predominantly the one who cooks, it’s my husband who cleans the dishes. Today, he and my son are cooking, and it will be a feast. A guy feast. Guy meat (Fred Flintstone size rib-eyes on the grill) with a couple of vegetable side dishes, pesto flatbread, and an appetizer of Caprese salad (this meal should have more protein, I guess, so chunks of buffalo mozzarella in a salad make sense). It will be delicious, over-the-top, and will have taken something close to 7 hours for them to prepare. It’s the kind of cooking done when someone is only occasionally in the kitchen. Pots and pans everywhere, multiple plates and silverware, everything piled in the sink; recyclables errantly in the trash, garbage tossed in with the food waste; drips, crumbs, spills, smears on every inch of countertop; the floor a gritty, splotchy mess.
But dinner will be lovely. A dozen long-stemmed peach roses grace a perfectly set table, napkin rings encircle cloth napkins we reserve for company, and our prettiest serving dishes are at the ready. The fancy pinot noir stemmed glassware await a quite good Oregon vintage, itself a nod to a holiday dinner we had at a fancy restaurant, and my husband tracked down the wine. I’m not allowed to look in the refrigerator because there are dessert treats they want to be a surprise, but I know what market they shopped at, so I have every reason to anticipate bite after delectable bite tonight.
It’s a celebration style dinner, even though we’re not celebrating anything special. My husband is using it to teach my son how to cook for a woman, how to cook for his mother, teaching important guy skills (how to start a grill, how to impress a woman, how to think like a woman – even though few carnivorous women would add chunks of cheese to a meal with steaks this size – how to put beauty as well as taste on the table).
I have no doubt that if my son ever spends an entire day making a meal to impress a carnivorous woman he is dating, he will have more for dessert than the treat he keeps hidden in his refrigerator. That boy will get laid for putting out a meal like this, as he should be. Although perhaps she’ll get laid, or they’ll both get laid. I’m not sure who will intend what kind of favoring and pleasuring, but I hope it will be mutual. When he’s dating, he’ll do the dishes afterward, as you can’t ask the girl on a date to clean up after your home-cooked meal. But when he marries – a strong, bright, happy, enthusiastic omnivore who loves to eat (since eating well is a metaphor for living well) – I hope she will happily clean up after he spends a day attending to her, making her feel loved and cared for, today’s modern version of providing and protecting. I hope she won’t feel oppressed or limited by her gender. I hope she’ll wash those dishes because she knows what it meant for him to dirty each one.
Tonight I will attempt to slow things down. My husband will even slow down enough to tent the meat before he serves it, a struggle with waiting he has only recently been able to win. I will sip the wine slowly, cut smaller than usual portions of the grilled brontosaurus, savor the flavors, textures, smells. After dinner, I will be in my near-destroyed kitchen for a long time. I will approximate Thich Nhat Hanh’s meditative dictum to do nothing other than wash the dishes when one is washing dishes. I endeavor to slow down even this part of our evening, stay in the moment, remain fully alive to clean the dishes, counters, floors, cabinet doors, hand wash the serving pieces then put each carefully away, every moment prolonging the celebration of our quiet dinner at home with three people who like the idea of sitting around the same table, talking and sharing food and the love put in to every action.