I can’t mince words, dear friends. Tonight is a wash. Except for one very bright, very shiny spot, today was just a useless farrago of a day, a day which I spent discovering anew, hour by hour, just how useless my work is, and just how useless I feel while I do it. It was a day for hearing Condoleeza Rice say, “well, there was really nothing we could have done to stop it” (it being the 9/11/01 attacks), and for hearing Bill Clinton say “well, we should have done something to stop it, but didn’t” (it being the literally unspeakable Tutsi massacre in Rwanda, which began on this week 10 years ago). When I thought I had heard all I could take from national and international news, I put on the local news instead, only to discover just how mean life can be, particularly if you live in a housing project. (I will spare you my tirade on these two events, mainly because they involve a lot of tears and spluttering, but the short version is that I am aching to find who was responsible for both events, the death of Constance Lloyd and the release of the surveillance video that captured Paris Lane’s suicide. If a responsible party ever comes to light, the first thing I will do is hire a good lawyer. The second thing I will do is find those guilty parties and dislocate their thumbs.)
Even on the mindless entertainment front, the glass-teat opiate that is supposed to dull my synapses enough to take the painful edge off the above, today was a bad day. Even though I knew, just knew, from the beginning, that this would happen, it still cheeses me that Fox has decided to replace this with this.
So what kept today from being a dead loss? It was that one very bright, very shiny spot, otherwise known as Lunch with the Famous and Not-At-All-Evil http://www.bakerina.com/prepare_to_meet_your_bake/2003/12/faulkners_folly.html>Walt. In a just universe, Walt and I would be having lunch together at least twice a week, but considering that I live in Noo Yawk City and Walt lives in Phoenix, we must resign ourselves to our unjust circumstances, save lunch for when Walt makes the Big Trek East, and spend the rest of our free time goofing off and riffing off each other on snarky websites. (For those of you who have not visited this particular snarky website, I encourage you heartily to do so, as Walt and I keep company with some truly brilliant writers there.)
Not only was I lucky enough to have lunch with Walt, I was also lucky enough to receive the news that he has collected close to ten years’ worth of his writings on one handy website. Run, do not walk, to Walt’s site. He is a transcendent writer, and that is a word I don’t bandy about lightly. His observations on the Pennsylvania Turnpike are spot-on. His descriptions of the Los Angeles Public Library and the Cholla Branch of the Phoenix Public Library make me want to move into both buildings. And I was utterly unable to resist a travel essay called “Bentonsport and the Sexy Part of Southeastern Iowa”. He’s right. Southeastern Iowa is sexy.
Seriously. You should not be here anymore. You should be there. Go there now.
Oh, my graciousness. One does find the most unexpected things in the course of research. Look at what I found in Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History by H.E. Jacob, originally published in 1944 and out of print until 1997, when it was republished by the Lyons Press. These comments are excerpted from the chapter on the invention of the plow:
In all of history no subsequent invention vies with this in importance. The discovery of electricity, of the railroad, or the airplane was not of such far-reaching effect and did not so alter the aspect of Mother Earth as the plow. We shall never know where plowing was first discovered, but primitives used it from Ireland to North Africa, from western Europe to India and China.
This we know, however, that it was invented in some river valley, for only well-irrigated land would lend itself to the first crude plow. The oldest real culture was, necessarily, an oasis culture…
Wherever men learned to utilize the plow, throughout the Orient and the Occident, it powerfully inflamed the sexual imagination. It resembled the instrument with which man overcomes woman, inflicting upon her the selfsame violence that the furrowing plow inflicts upon the earth…
The righteous plowman, in his labor, conducts himself as a husband toward his wife. To symbolize this ethical relationship, the Roman monogamous marriage was solemnized upon a plow. And Hesiod adjured the Greek plowman to walk naked behind his plow. The sacred nexus between the man and the earth must not be impaired by clothing. When the harvest had been taken and the earth stripped of its blessing, the peasant was directed to lie with his wife upon the naked soil in holy copulation. They would remind the earth that it must bear afresh!
Hmm, erm, I think I need to go lie down now…
Dear friends, I found this little vignette inside one of my old notebooks. I don’t remember when I wrote it, but it doesn’t really matter. Some themes are timeless, ageless, endless. Apparently shlepping is my idiom, and always will be. The following was written after I had taken a friend shopping at the farmer’s market with me, and had shown remarkable restraint by only buying 20 pounds of fruit and veg and then shlepping it all home on the N train.
“How can you live this way?” she said with dismay, as if I were selling crack to schoolchildren, or starring in the rankest, most degrading of skin flicks. I knew what she meant, though. I had asked myself the same question the day last summer that one of my bags tilted to one side, and before I knew what happened, $30 worth of apricots, cherry tomatoes, Rose Fir potatoes and Elephant Heart plums bounced merrily onto the tracks. Not having the energy, patience or cash to go through all that again, I cried almost all the way home. At about Astoria Boulevard, I finally started to smile, thinking of subway rats eating my produce and then becoming too fussy for the fast food scraps they usually live on. I imagined them coming across a half-eaten peach and asking “is it tree-ripened?” in the voice of Paul Lynde as Templeton the Rat in Charlotte’s Web.
In the end, I guess it’s a matter of picking our poisons. Someday I will not live here anymore, and I’ll have to drive to a supermarket, much as I did when I lived in Honesdale, and as I sit behind some Canyonero, unable to see the traffic light in front of me, I’ll wonder, why do I do this? How can I live this way?
What wondrous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade…
How well the skillful gardener drew
Of flowers and herbs this dial new,
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And as it works, th’ industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!
—from “The Garden” by Andrew Marvell
I know that not three months ago, in this very space, I was complaining about people, specifically New Yorkers, who complain about winter. I made a lot of noise about how a harsh winter was the price we had to pay for a mild spring, that when winter is too warm and dry, spring feels like an unearned pleasure. I held no truck with people who gave vox pop interviews to the local news about how they hated this weather, just hated it, couldn’t wait for spring, and if I remember correctly, I harshed on people whose only crime was to have a pain threshhold lower than mine.
Dear friends, consider this my apology, my mea culpa, my official crying of “uncle.” I want spring, and I want it now.
The fact that the vernal equinox was two weeks ago is immaterial to me. The fact that daylight savings time starts tonight matters little (except, of course, for longer daylight—woo-hoo!). It is not spring yet. It’s not exactly winter, either; no, it’s one of those weird interseasonal limboes. One day the temperature hits 69 degrees, the wind is warm and friendly, firemen smile at you in the park and you have to fight the urge to lick them on the neck. (Errr, maybe *you* don’t...) Two days later, your local Fox affiliate interrupts The Simpsons to warn you that a nor’easter is on its way, and your neighbors are rushing around, throwing plastic tarps over their hyacinths and narcissus. The next day, you can’t walk a block without becoming snowblinded, and the paper bag in which you were foolish enough to pack your lunch disintegrates violently on the sidewalk. Then the snow disappears, the sky stays grey, the temperature hovers around 53 and refuses to budge.
I want spring and I want it now. This past winter has left a lot of cobwebs in its wake, and it is time to burn them off. It’s true that I was given a particularly nice gift this winter, but too many people I love were not so lucky. I have been witness to the end of a marriage, two broken engagements, lost jobs, estrangement from parents, estrangement from children, the death of friendship, the death of love, heartbreak, heartbreak, heartbreak. On a global level, I should no longer be stunned by the level of cruelty humans can show to each other, but it always stuns me, every damn time. I have had enough, and I am not alone.
I am ready to pack away my sweaters and unpack my t-shirts. I am ready to play a lot of XTC. For some reason, XTC always makes me feel springy, particularly anything from Mummer, Skylarking or Apple Venus Vol. I. The first time I heard “River of Orchids,” I thought it was one of the weirdest things they’d ever written, but the more I hear it, the warmer it makes me feel on the inside. To me, it is the sound of flowers exploding into bloom, riots of color saturation. It is the sound of rain in May, rain that makes grass bright green and impossibly soft, that makes dogwoods white and lacy, that makes rivers rise.
Most of all, though—and really, are you surprised that this is the direction in which I was going all along?—I am ready for spring food. I am so ready for spring food that under the influence of a shot of wheatgrass juice (I swear, honey, it wasn’t me, it was the chlorophyll!), I went to the market this morning and bought 1/2 pound of pea shoots and a dozen Araucana eggs. I used to buy these eggs on an almost weekly basis. Then the New York Times and Martha Stewart discovered these beautiful eggs with the celadon shells, deep orange yolks and intensely buttery taste, and suddenly the eggs were sold out by 7:45 a.m. I used to pay $3.00/dozen for them. This morning I found them for $5.00/half-dozen. Of course I forked over for them, of course I did. These are not eggs for baking, even though they would bring wonderful color and flavor to brioche...but no, no, no, no. These are eggs for omelettes, for frittata, or for those gorgeous custardy scrambled eggs made over simmering water in a double-boiler, the kind that you make only for someone you really love, because ‘tain’t no way you’re going to stand at the stove for 45 minutes, stirring eggs for someone you don’t love.
It’s a good start, these beautiful fresh eggs, these sweet green pea shoots, but it’s not enough. My favorite salad is a mix of pea shoots for sweetness, arugula for pepper and sorrel for the hit of sour. I love sorrel so much that I have eaten it out of the bag by the handful, like potato chips, although the food scientist extraordinaire Shirley Corriher warns that sorrel can be toxic eaten in macroquantities. Oops. I am ready for sorrel. I am ready for ramps, the wild leeks that are only in season for about five weeks, but are plentiful and ubiquitous during that season. Most of all, I am ready for rhubarb. Unlike my friends in a faraway country, I can’t get good forced rhubarb in January, and thus must wait for rhubarb season before I can make rhubarb jam, rhubarb compote, rhubarb fool (basically rhubarb compote stirred into whipped cream) and the marvelous steamed pudding of rhubarb and vanilla sponge evocatively known as pig’s bum. I can taste it now, burning its sweet-sour shock into my tongue, making everything taste bright and clean again. But no, it is not in the bond, not until May, anyway.
Sigh. It’s four weeks to May. I can wait four weeks. But I will still feel it in my bloodstream. Bring the spring, bring the spring, bring the spring.
