Keep Moving by Dick Van Dyke

anybody has ever gotten to what happens, which makes the way you live even more important. It is the only time you have to recall and assess and account for those experiences, the connections you had with other people, the work you did, the words you said, and the friends and family you leave behind. So it’s worth making sure those scrapbooks are filled. Make sure you have fun. Make sure you smile and laugh. Make sure you live.
    Here’s a final note about Michelle: she spent her last morning alive on the telephone, talking with her friends. At noon she went into a coma—and that was it. The last thing she ever said to me was, “You made me a better person.”
    Then it was just me and our dog, Rocky, and all of Michelle’s things in the house, which suddenly felt very large and empty. It was October 2009, the day before Halloween, in fact. I remember going outside to put the finishing touches on my annual Halloween decorations, for which I was renowned in our neighborhood; I hadcontemplated taking the year off, but Michelle had insisted I go on with the show. I could hear her voice as I worked. The weather was still warm, and the yard was still green and the gardens in bloom. It was beautiful. It was all Michelle’s doing.
    But I couldn’t help thinking that I was supposed to go first.

Sit or Get Off the Pot Roast Sit or Get Off the Pot Roast

    As near as I can figure, the history of the pot roast is as plain and basic as the ingredients themselves. It seems to have originated on farms in the 1800s where the cooking was done in large pots dangling over a hearth. A big slab of meat and an assortment of vegetables were tossed in, and everything cooked slowly in natural juice, water, wine, or some kind of stock. Recipes began to appear in cookbooks at the end of the 1800s.
    By the early 1900s pot roast was standard fare in homes across America. The 1904 edition of The Modern Cook Book and Household Recipes included a recipe for “Braised Beef Pot Roast”; a similar recipe appeared in the 1937 version of My New Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book. And when André Simon described the roasting of a two-and-a-half-pound rump of beef in his 1952 book, A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy, the pot roast was referred to as “an old Yankee recipe.”
    I mention this only because, while doing my research, I did not find instructions anywhere that a pot roast should be delivered weekly to someone who has lost their spouse. But as soon as word got out that Michelle was gone, my family and friends showed their concern by dropping off food. One day I came home and found a large pan of meatloaf on the front porch. Another time it was a baking dish of lasagna. Then someone brought a pot roast. Some dishes were delivered with reheating instructions; others came with a loving note, “Call if you need anything else.” Pretty soon what I needed was more freezer space to store the food.
    I like pot roast, meatloaf, and lasagna as much as anyone, maybe even more. As my wife, Arlene, has learned, my taste in food was shaped during my midwestern youth. My favorite meal, for instance, is fried chicken, corn on the cob, and mashed potatoes, followed closely by meatloaf, pot roast, and lasagna. I have never tired of any of these dishes.
    But the casseroles friends dropped off and the messages they left, “Dick, it’s me—and I want to come by with some food,” took on a momentum that I couldn’t keep up with. I could only eat so much, and my appetite had disappeared.
    Then I realized that the pot roasts were more than considerate goodwill gestures, more than mere precooked meals I could pull out of the refrigerator when I got hungry, more than a favorite recipe intended tohelp out until I got back into a routine. They were coded messages!
    It was as clear as the mozzarella on top of the lasagnas. All these meals were dropped off by women who were also single, many of them widowed themselves; they were letting me know they were out