Sometimes all you can do is laugh.
You get up that morning with the best intentions to make a special dinner and set a pretty Christmas table for the two of you.
You hand wash the old Spode Christmas Tree plates and the pretty glasses with white Christmas trees and take out your wedding silver.
You spend hours chopping three kinds of peppers, celery, scallions, Italian salami, capers, and garlic, and boiling, peeling and chopping eggs, thawing shrimp, washing and drying lettuce, mixing a dressing. You both have a hankering for Mama Leone's Shrimp Salad and the special shrimp sauce that she was famous for in NYC since 1906, ever since Enrico Caruso urged Louisa Leone to open an Italian restaurant in her living room.
It is the salad you made so often back in the 1960s when you were young marrieds.
And you make another old favorite, Cucumber Aspic, more chopping, another dressing. You feel so lucky that your husband loves aspics as much as you do.
And you sit down to eat after taking hot French bread out of the oven. This is going to be so good. And there will be leftovers for your lunch the next day.
Your husband prays, giving thanks for the meal you're about to eat and then he takes the first bite.
You put a bite in your mouth and then your husband asks: "Did you cook the shrimp?"
You spit your bite out on your Spode Christmas Tree plate.
You don't cry. Not like the time you were eight months pregnant with your third child, and your daughter and husband go to the best pizza place in town and they come home without the best pizza in town and say they dropped it on the sidewalk.
Now you groan, thinking about all that time spent in the kitchen when you could have been working on a blog post.
And then you just laugh, dump it all in the trashcan and eat all the French bread and lots of the Cucumber Aspic and wish you'd made baked potatoes to go with the meal.
And you remember that it is 2020, after all.
