APRIL 2020
ON MY SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY, I wake up at three-thirty in the morning to get ready for an appearance on the Today show. I wash my face, brush my hair, put on a business-appropriate blouse, and pour coffee in my eyes. Or it feels like I did. It is early on the West Coast. The show celebrated by sending me two rosemary plants, two lavender plants, and two huge bouquets of flowers—one gift for each decade. At a little past five in the morning, I am live on the air with Hoda, Savannah, and Carson. I uncork a bottle of my favorite champagne, which they also sent, and I share a virtual toast with everybody.
I laughingly say it is too early to drink, and at that hour, it does seem a little ridiculous, though, as we make jokes, I remember occasions when I was on the road with Ed and we rolled into our hotel room around this same time and had just one more. I wasn’t always the goody two-shoes people imagined. In fact, once I am off the air, I say to myself, What the hell, you’re only sixty once in your life, and I take a sip of champagne.
Woo-hoo. Wild times. Par-tee.
The girl’s still got it.
And then the girl changes back into her T-shirt and sweats, and goes back to bed.
* * *
I have no qualms about hitting this milestone. I have thought about it more and more with the approach of the actual date, April 23. Sixty definitely sounded older and more AARP-worthy than fifty-nine, which itself held a certain significance, like waiting in traffic to make a left-hand turn from one stage of life into another. I was more afraid of the way I was going to feel than the way I actually do feel throughout the day.
After I get up, I enjoy a leisurely day of doing nothing. I read the paper and sip more coffee. I make some of my favorite blueberry, banana, and oat muffins. I love muffins, especially these, and the delicious smell from the oven takes me back to my childhood, when my mom made blueberry muffins or banana bread and I hovered in the kitchen waiting for the first bite of those freshly baked, warm treats. I am ten years old again.
I use fresh blueberries and bananas, of course, but as I whip up this batch, the generous splash of vanilla the recipe calls for, while seemingly minor, stands out to me as a crucial ingredient, almost a secret ingredient that gives the muffins their flavor. Or if it is not entirely responsible for the flavor, it enhances the taste in the same way butter finishes off pasta sauce, lemon squeezed on top of a cantaloupe brings out the lush juices, and rosemary in vegetables somehow turns every bite into a celebration of the garden.
“There are no such things as secrets in the kitchen,” wrote the late, great LA chef Michael Roberts, whose restaurant, Trumps, was an institution on a par with Spago in the eighties. “But there are secret ingredients, those ingredients that are not tasted but would be missed if they were omitted. A secret ingredient is one that mysteriously improves the flavor of a dish without calling attention to itself.”
I treat my birthday the same way: by making sure I add the secret ingredients. I go for a walk. I smell the roses. I cut some flowers. Spring is in bloom. Wolfie comes by but stays outside in the backyard because of Covid-19. I meet him out there. It is weird and strange and sad, especially because I don’t get a hug—not from him or anyone else. I field birthday texts from friends I might normally see on my birthday and tell myself to feel the love they are sending me.
At night, my closest girlfriends send over takeout from one of our favorite restaurants—the French bistro where we would have gathered were it not for the virus-inspired lockdown—and eat together over Zoom. It’s not the same as in person, but we make the best of it, telling stories and laughing for a couple of hours. I didn’t really hang out with girlfriends in my twenties, and I didn’t really have any back then. I was always surrounded by guys—Ed and all of the techs, engineers, and musicians who worked with him at the studio and on tour. It was like the Scout troop from the dark side of the moon.
But tonight is one more instance of the way my girlfriends have helped me make new memories. We have held one another’s hands through major and minor life events—health scares, birthdays, anniversaries, job changes, career decisions, elections, and now a pandemic. We bring so much shared history to the table—or to Zoom in this case—and the experience never disappoints.
I get insights and understanding I wouldn’t otherwise have had, and for however long we are together—tonight it’s for a couple of hours—I rarely think about myself, not in the brooding, judgmental way I do when I am alone. Instead, I am giving, sharing, serving—whether its food, an opinion, encouragement, support, advice, or laughter.
Remember poet Shel Silverstein’s children’s book The Giving Tree? It’s about a tree that loved a little boy more than she loved herself. It ends with both of them having grown older, the boy an old man in need of a place to sit and rest and the tree now no more than a stump but still eager to help him in some way. “Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest,” she says. “And the boy did. And the tree was very happy.”
This is at the core of my love of cooking. As I have redefined my relationship with food over the past decade—first with my trip to Italy, then by writing a cookbook, and then with the TV series—I have redefined my life and reconnected with values I consider important. My cooking is about a passion for the process: picking out ingredients, creating something new and delicious, then sharing it with other people.
When you are locked into a dieting mindset, you are not eating with other people. You are not able to have relationships during mealtime. You are distancing yourself from food, from other people, from yourself, and from life. Cooking enabled me to reconnect with everything I had denied myself and missed. It’s a process that I work through daily, because old bad habits are slow to fade completely away, but I try, and try, and try, and when I am successful, like Shel Silverstein’s giving tree, I am very happy.
* * *
Someone asked what I want for my birthday. Here’s what I want:
I want to be able to laugh like Julia Roberts, a kind of joyous, from-the-heart laugh that erupts from within and shakes the entire room.
I want my kid to be healthy and happy.
I want the same for my brothers and their wives and kids and my friends and their families.
I want people to have enough to eat and drink, especially kids.
I want there to be enough of whatever people need to pass around so everyone gets their fair portion.
That’s it.
* * *
You know what scares me about turning sixty? It’s closer to eighty, and I think that’s when I am going to die. I’ll explain.
Many years ago, Ed and I went to a party at singer Sammy Hagar’s house. At the time, he was living near us at the beach. There was a psychic at the party whom I had seen privately about a year earlier for help losing weight. At the time, I was one hundred and thirty-six pounds and thought I needed to lose ten pounds, which was a sure sign of crazy. But I was seeing a psychic for diet advice, so enough said.
The psychic started by asking what I had for breakfast. When I told him that I had an English muffin with peanut butter, he shuddered and backed away from me, as if hearing that had caused him to glimpse something horrific.
“No, no, no, no, Valerie,” he scolded. “You can’t do that. It sets you up wrong for the whole day.”
I should have asked who was telling him that—was it his opinion or was someone on the other side providing this information, and if that was the case, who was it, because the women on my side of the family who might have been hovering around him would have said that this wasn’t enough, and they would have encouraged me to eat even more. Nevertheless, I believed him. Breakfast became coffee, and I was thrilled when we crossed paths again at Sammy’s.
We found a quiet place to sit and he gave me another reading. For whatever reason, this one focused on life and longevity. During the reading, he casually said that I was going to die in my early eighties and that Ed was going to pass away in his mid-sixties. Perhaps because he was so specific or perhaps because all of us wonder how long this inexplicable miracle of our existence is going to last, I never forgot what he said.
I recalled his reading after both of my parents passed, three years apart but at the same age of eighty-two. Ed, who had turned sixty-five in January, did not seem like he was about to walk through the exit door, but he wasn’t having an easy time, either.
It made me think. If I had only twenty years left, what would I want to do? Why limit it to twenty years? What if I had only one day? Or one hour? What would I want to accomplish starting right now? The answer came to me in a flash. I want to stop wasting time. I want to love myself. I want to get off this treadmill of not loving myself. I want to be able to forgive myself for the slips and the tears and the moments when I don’t feel strong or loving or kind. I want to be able to recognize and embrace life’s delights when they appear. I want to give myself permission to always be me, whatever that looks and feels like at this age.
The best part of turning sixty is that I can say, “Enough already,” and mean it. The number isn’t important anymore. It’s the feeling that is important. How do I feel? How am I making others feel? I spent a lifetime being told to step outside my comfort zone. I never want to leave it now. I want to spend the rest of my life the way author Anne Lamott described in her book Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith: “Age has given me what I’ve been looking for my entire life—it’s given me me. It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now.” And you know what? That is exactly the size I want to feel comfortable in—me.
* * *
The question is, how do you do this? I spout all these things about wanting to be kinder and more loving to myself, as do so many other people, as if it’s possible to flip a switch and be that person in seven steps. It is not. What I have found since saying, “Enough already,” a few months ago is that it requires work. Every single day I have to remind myself that the way I want to love myself and experience joy is not so much an end goal as it is a value and an intention to realign with over and over again.
What I am learning and relearning and constantly reminding myself of is that joy, happiness, gratitude—all those things we all want, including love—won’t find me. I have to go out and find them. All of us do. It works that way for everyone.
The good news is that instead of seven steps or fifteen steps or a whole how-to book there is only one step to being kinder and more loving: you follow your heart.
You just do it.
You follow your heart.
When you let it, your heart is always going to lead to the same place, a place of helping, giving, and being kind. I do this with food. I love to feed people. It fills my heart. I wish I had pushed myself in this direction ages ago—off the scale and away from the mirror to feeding others. I didn’t know better. But the experience never fails to return the kindness and love I want to feel myself. It lets me see the me I like. It’s the me that I never try to fix—because part of me doesn’t feel like it needs fixing. It’s kind and loving and proof that the most important part of me—my heart—is not broken.
By my birthday, I have been on lockdown for a month and a half. I hate what Covid has done to us. Everyone I know is confused, scared, pissed off, looking for answers, and grasping for hope. I want to invite them over and cook for them.