Years ago, when I had 5/8ths of my stomach removed (bleeding ulcer), recovery was slow and life, on a number of different levels, was difficult.. I stopped reading—well, I didn’t stop exactly, not entirely. I just stopped caring about fictional characters’ dire straits. I had my own dire straits.

During the development of my ulcer, when I was gulping Tums, I was able to read a little Neville Shute and Daphne du Maurier. Frenchman’s Creek comes to mind. (I think it was serialized in Ladies Home Journal.) Not Rebecca . I read it before a whole industry grew up around that famous novel: movies and sequels and prequels and spin-offs. Later, after my surgery, I couldn’t even cope with stories . I read cookbooks. I found them very soothing.

I’m reading cookbooks again, even buying the odd one. I thought this is because I have someone to cook for—my son Matt who is with me for the duration—and certainly that is a pressure, having to come up with three complete meals a day when I frequently do not feel like cooking or eating anything and wish I could take a break. I realized that today as I served lunch: cauliflower steaks.

I’ve been reading the recipe for some time, but I had never got around to buying one until recently when I discovered riced cauliflower for stir-fries or a substitute for mashed potatoes. For years, my definition of eternity had been one person and a cauliflower, or even two. Full disclosure: That’s an alteration of the Bombecks’ definition of eternity: two people and a ham. But I was reading recipes this morning and I had a big cauliflower in the fridge and suddenly…!

It was good, for us and the planet.

To toss or not to toss.

I am still finding more goodies in my files, clippings and notes and ideas and commonplaces that get shredded by my faithful shredder, Matthew, or bits and pieces that deserve a nod and a nibble. When is a blog not a blog? When it’s half-baked.

The decisions are killing me—no, they’re not. They are taxing me (that, too), but most, worst of all, they are draining me. I think I have commented before that I am capable of only so many decisions a day, beginning with the major ones like when or if to get out of bed, what to do first, what to cook/eat for breakfast lunch and dinner and in-between, and when to quit, that is, knock off for the day and try again tomorrow. Life is so daily. I’ve said that before.

I am still dealing with Remembrance and Disposal.

It’s the title of a Facts & Arguments essay that appeared in a Globe and Mail essay some time in July, 2003 and that I picked up again this week. I looked up the author, Antonia Morton—“Your Plain Language Specialist". She is a professional. She is articulate, she writes and edits and teaches others; she is practical and funny. Like me. No wonder I kept the article.

A packrat (like me), she realized, sort of like me, that no one is ever going to research my files and write a book, or even a footnote, about them. She has all these folders under various categories— theatre reviews, kids’ letters, income tax receipts receipts, work. That’s the killer. I keep finding synopses of plays and books and movies and sometimes first drafts, as well as ideas and outlines and pitches and queries of work that I will never write unless I live another hundred years.

Morton concludes her essay by reporting that she has reduced her past to an all-purpose Memorabilia folder, keeping one piece of paper each from all her past files, trimmed neatly, with a blank side for notes. Like me.

It doesn’t work, though.I If it weren’t for Matthew and the shredder, I’d have a bonfire of inanities: phone numbers, appointments, passwords, both obsolete and new. recipes, and words. “Words, words, words”, to quote Shakespeare. I have to keep those until I look them up.

You’ll know when.