I Freelanced for Martha Stewart

...a dispatch from bewilderness

Photo by Mockup Graphics on Unsplash

In my first life, I made sense of thousands of stories on global warming and lip gloss and sports bras and peaches and beaches and lemons and lemmings and candidates. I was at home with the range.

A few decades back, I freelanced for Martha Stewart. The Martha Stewart who bakes cake, and spreads something or other on something or other and sprays something or other on something else. Oh, right, spreads mulch. And jam. And sprays herself with calming mist.

She said she was born with a needle in one hand and a hammer in the other. It was a good line. I wrote it. I also contributed to culinary compendiums packed with “foolproof recipes.” Then I got hit by a drunk with a truck. At first, I couldn’t remember the accident. Or Martha. Or much of anything else.

Eventually, I began recalling stuff and scratching anything I could recall on any surface I could find — paper plates, paper cups, placemats, napkins, coffee stirrers and Popsicle sticks.

I called them scraps. They were not in alphabetical order, not in numerical order, not in chronological order, but out of order, like me. The good news is I survived. The bad news was brain damage.

Then Martha did a splashy swimsuit cover for Sports Illustrated and videos for TikTok in roughly that order after getting out of jail. One moment, she was the world’s first self-made woman billionaire. The next moment, she was behind bars. She learned to crochet and taught it to inmates while in jail.

Here are a few quotes from Martha:

• “I catnap now and then, but I think while I nap, so it's not a waste of time.”

• “I couldn't find a good book about entertaining in 1982, so I decided to write it. That’s about the same year yours truly began freelancing.”

• “I think that people want to know how to do practical everyday things like get pomegranate seeds out of a pomegranate.” Yours truly doesn’t do that everyday.

• “I want to see the polar bear migration before there are no polar bears and to see glaciers before they’re gone.”

• When life gives you lemons, make lemon juice. Martha provided/still provides “18 unexpected ways to clean with lemons.” Often mixed with salt.