Cooking with Baz by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781741752731
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd

12

BAZ’S KITCHEN NIGHTMARES

When some people get sick, particularly with degenerative diseases such as cancer or dementia, it is said that often as well as creating physical ill health, the disease also eats away at the veneer of civility that people have armed themselves with to get through life. All pretences fall away and the elemental being that lies at the core comes to the surface, and often it is not pretty. My mother was always a very polite, even-tempered soul who radiated calm. The only people she ever seemed not to get along with were highly strung neurotic types who mistook her shyness for a sense of superiority, but most people recognised her as a gentle soul. Even as she battled the ravages and indignities of her cancer, she did so with a calm grace that touched even the most hardened medical professional. She managed to retain a dignified yet determined stance to her fight and throughout was still as nice as pie to everyone.

Everyone except Baz. Man, did he cop it. For that first year, I was also living at home, and Di was rarely terse with me, radiating nothing but love even in her darkest, most painful moments. But Baz could do nothing right. I don’t know whether it was some form of payback for all his misdemeanours throughout their marriage – all the cold dinners never eaten, all those late nights staggering in rotten drunk, all the times he had embarrassed her in public with his loudmouthed exuberance – but she would snipe at virtually everything Baz did. He became the vent for her pain and darkness. Every time I did something for Di, no matter how trivial, she was incredibly grateful. Baz could have taken a bullet for her and she would merely have snapped, ‘Don’t bleed on the carpet!’

What amazed me, though, was how Baz copped it on the chin. Patience had never been his forte yet here he was, taking Di’s needling with as good a grace as I’d ever seen. Before Di got sick I would have doubted his capacity to look after her, but he really stepped up to the plate. He took on all the cleaning – in fact the running of the entire household. I would be amazed to come home from uni to find Baz ironing. He would be in Di’s room every few minutes acquiescing to her requests to rearrange the pillows she would be sitting up on. He was forever opening and closing the curtains in Di’s room according to her capricious whim: the light would be too bright, then it would be too dark and depressing. She wanted to see the water of the lake so could he open the curtains wider. And sit her up. The she-oak outside was making too much noise scratching up against the window so Baz was out there pruning branches, with Di barking orders from her bed telling him he was doing it all wrong.

I was amazed at how Baz put up with it.

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