Last Train Out with Mamie Morgan: An exercise in beauty

For parties, my friend Christina makes this dish: a block of cream cheese topped with sesame seeds and soy sauce. Antithetical to fancy, it reminds me of something a host might have served at cocktail parties in the 1950s, say, on a yellow fold-out table. Somehow the dish is more than the sum of its parts, and we all scramble the moment it arrives.

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Currently, my husband Alan and I are staying in this cabin near Twin Lakes, Colorado, a two-hour drive west of Denver. There’s even a jacuzzi outside that faces the Rockies. It’s stunning here, stark, particularly the temperatures that peak at 90 some days but dip down into the high 30s at night. This morning, padding into the living room, I saw Alan rubbing my bathing suit back and forth in his hands.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Warming up your suit. You left it out all night in the cold, and I knew you’d want to get into it first thing.”

(He then proceeded to walk toward the microwave with it, and I assured him that wouldn’t be necessary.)

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Christina prepares this other party dish, also cheese-driven. Essentially ricotta whipped with lemon zest, salt, and pepper — she serves it alongside pesto, prosciutto, tomatoes and a loaf of stecca. She served it just last week at their housewarming party. After years and years of renting, Chris and her husband Brett bought a home in the spring and set to working on it immediately. They put down new floors and painted the kitchen cabinets a color called turmeric. In the master bedroom there’s a headboard Brett built from a felled tree. The guest bathroom is bedecked with a magenta mural our friend Nicole painted. In the basement they’re mid-work on a party room with leather furniture and spinning lights. They’ve even decoupaged the fireplace with old album covers. As I toured the home, holding precariously both a glass of wine and a plate of ricotta, I couldn’t stop smiling. Every single thing felt like Christina’s bright, creative, capable soul evidenced in this physical world.

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Today is September 7th, what would be my father’s eighty-third birthday. He always loved hummingbirds, but particularly so when he became very sick. He liked for his lounge chair to face the window where, outside, he and my mother had hung two feeders. Perhaps as mobility became a bigger and bigger challenge, he was awed by the rapidity of their tiny wings.

When I walk outside to read a cheesy thriller in the Colorado sun, I notice a single hummingbird feeder, bright red against the greens and brown-blues of nature. Birds seem a rarity at this high an elevation, and I think that might make the feeder appreciate its few guests whenever they do happen to show up.

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In middle school, my best friend H was gorgeous. Dark-haired, mysterious, deeply talented—it amazed me that she never went through any sort of awkward phase. I carried that stint for the both of us. It wasn’t just the weird clothes and frizzy hair and coke-bottle glasses; I had a temper and was known to talk back, skip school. None of the popular girls liked me, and I was consistently left off the slumber party invite list.

“Can you believe we weren’t invited?” I’d say, exasperated, every time.

“Truly,” H would mimick. “Let’s spend the night at my house instead.”

Years later I learned that H had been invited to those parties. She just didn’t want me to feel all alone.

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Every year, in this issue, we celebrate beautiful women. While my rational brain understands by beauty we mean that interior bulb these humans possess — how they utilize it to innovate and serve our community — I always become a little stumped with what to write. Something about the word beauty always makes me return to my make-up routine, which, incidentally, has not changed very much in 25 years.

To brainstorm, I began jotting the above notes into my phone as an exercise in beauty, in what I think that word might actually mean, value. And the more I turned these blips in time over and over, the more I began to define it as how we enact and subsequently exchange our interior good, our creativity, into the temporal world. A communion of sorts.

Last summer, for my 40th birthday, Alan sent our crew to Sea Island. It was a decidedly fancy vacation for my decidedly unfancy friends. We drank champagne and got massages. We listened to Taylor Swift on a boat. And before we left, Christina handed me a standard-sized envelope. Inside she’d written a three-page letter on notebook paper in her loopy scrawl, detailing the value of our friendship. I keep the letter on my bedside table as a bookmark and read it once a week or more.

For the most part, I haven’t seen H in 15 years or more, but a while back I spotted her at Michael’s. It was 8 a.m. and raining outside, and we were the only two customers. We knocked into each other at the sticker aisle, where we spoke, the both of us buying art supplies in our jammies, sure to make something good of it at some point down the road.