The Cook

The Cook

There are times such as this

Thanksgiving Day when

I have looked down upon

this kitchen or that

table, as though I had become

a fly on the wall, or

detached from it all, a separating

of mind from body for just

that second, I’m free,

and I have seen

them each

for the substances they hold

inside, the pushes and turns and

contrivances that fall, and the

everlasting climbs.  It is in the

many crevasses I look  . . .

And there she is, silly woman

who once was a girl but now

is not, holding to a limb:

that broths and butters and

freshly ground wheat might

serve as balms and masks

and potions for just one day

(or maybe, forever? she prays).

It is your ineffective but best shot,

I tell her, as I wipe the brow and pour

her heady wine.

                                            

Many cooks just want everyone to be happy.  We go to extremes at times, perhaps thinking that an extra few hours of simmering the bones for broth might do the trick of making happiness for all.  Ha.  Every year I grind wheat berries for flour to bake bread to make the crumbs to make the dressing for a turkey.  It is so much tastier that way, but it is an ineffective strategy for bringing lasting happiness for even a day, much less forever.  I woke up this morning, thinking compassionately of all the various challenges I perceived in each person’s life at my dinner table last week, as though I’d been granted a glimpse from above – and then I saw the cook in her endless trying.  I laughed at her, at myself, but there is a deep challenge for the cook too:  I heard the words, “Your ineffective but best shot,” and I got out of bed to write this down.      

Family Ring

While at my wine tasting class last week, I told my tablemates about my son’s recent engagement and about the pretty diamond ring he had presented to his girlfriend – and one of the people there said to me, “Is it a family ring he gave her?  “Hell no,” I said without blinking, “Our families don’t have diamonds laying around!”  I thought that was a funny thing to say, but no one really laughed – and I suppose it is because, in Virginia, most people have family rings and family names and family properties which are passed on as in old English society – and so it is not a funny thing to admit we have no family rings to give.

But later that night I remembered the one I had at home – my mother’s diamond engagement ring that she left to me after her death more than seven years ago.  It was still in my jewelry box, in the small plastic box in the small Ziploc bag with my name printed in her familiar hand.  I took the ring out of its plastic bag and box to have a look at it – a humble, WWII-era kind of ring.  It has a very tiny diamond and it is propped on a large amount of “setting” material (to make the diamond appear larger, I suppose), and the gold band is kind of thin.  It beckoned me to try it on for size, and it fit perfectly on the pinky finger of my right hand.  After looking at it under a lamplight, I saw it sparkle at me, and so I decided to keep it there on the pinky finger, which had never occurred to me before.  

There is a woman my age who comes to my neighborhood's puppy playgroup about 7 AM every day, and one morning a few weeks ago, I noticed how the sun was hitting her hand in such a way as to cause brilliant shards of light to leap forth – and so I commented on the ring she wore, its brilliance in the springtime sun – and she proceeded to tell me the story of her grandmother from England who had two identical rings made out of the diamond earrings she wore as a young girl, and how she had given one ring to each daughter – and one daughter stayed in England but the other daughter came to America, and so the diamonds were separated for many, many years, but then the daughter in England died as an old woman with no children and so the ring came to her sister in America who is the mother of this woman I am talking about – and the mother is alive but in a nursing home and has no use for the rings, and so the rings are under guardianship of this woman I am talking about. They are very large diamonds, by the way.  She proceeded to tell me that someday the rings would be given to her own two grown daughters – however, one daughter has just moved to England and therefore the rings may suffer the repeated fate of separation.  It's the kind of story you might hear in Virginia at 7 in the morning on an open field before anyone has showered or had breakfast.     

But my own story is simpler and far more humble.  My father must have given everything he had to buy the ring when he was a soldier in WWII and had no income other than what the war provided young men.  I was impressed by the thought of his commitment and intention.  I wish I knew the story of how he bought it, and when and how he gave it to her, and of what he was thinking – the story.  I don’t know it.

When my mother would knead dough for bread or pizza, or mix raw meat with her hands for a meatloaf, she would stand at the kitchen sink afterward with a toothpick to coax out the dough or meat that had gotten stuck beneath the diamond.  Because it is propped high on the setting, there is enough empty space beneath it to almost fit a coriander seed or even a bit of chopped garlic.  She would poke and scrape at that space till the diamond showed clear again.  And she would occasionally voice the fear that she might someday poke the diamond out of its setting, but I don’t think that ever happened.  

My mother would say on occasion that she thought the band had thinned or worn thin over the years – those were the words she used.  I was a teenager then, the last of five children, and she would have already put in 25 or 30 years of marriage and housework by then. And I would perfunctorily agree with her – a teenager’s way of not looking or listening but agreeing nevertheless.  But now that I am older than the age she was back then, and I am wearing the ring and listening for its story, and I have put in my own 30 years of cleaning and cooking and kneading . . . I can see all that she meant by thinning.

The band is still rounded at the top beside the small diamond and its large setting – but then, turning bout the sides it shows a gradual wearing down, until by the time it reaches the underside the band has become a thin wafer of gold, almost sharp, as though it could cut something, like a miniature rotary saw.  She would comment that someday the ring might fall off her finger because of all the thinness it had become, from all the work she had done in those 30 years and hence.  I don’t know if this wearing down is a testament to all the work my mother actually did or if it speaks more to the sub-par quality of gold during WWII, a composite maybe – or one that my father could afford.  I don’t know.  

It did not fall off her finger – and maybe only because my father had died by the time she was 60-ish, and the children had grown, and the work had become less. I wasn’t paying attention as to when she took off the ring and put it in the plastic box in the Ziploc bag – and I don’t know when she placed my name on it.     

I’ve kept the ring on my pinky finger since trying it on that night when someone asked me about family rings, and I continue to think about or imagine its stories, not big stories or big voices – not a flashy rock that sings or impresses anyone – but the one that was given me and the one that I remember.  

Moment of Silence

There is a man in front of me pumping

Gas into his car at Costco – and he is looking around,

Trying to make eye contact or connection

With someone, I think . . . anyone.  He glances

To my car several times, but I am wearing sunglasses

And can therefore angle my head away

While keeping my eyes pressed on him –

Such busy eyes, as gas churns into his car,

Roving the lot, into other cars holding faces, outside too,

The shirt not long enough to cover the belly

Pouring out from beneath and center,

A round pot, two hands full, of belly flab.

It wasn’t until his gas tank was full

And he had maneuvered himself around

To replace the nozzle, that I see a tag

At the nape of his shirt, my head no longer

Averted but rather focused straight

On him because he is not looking at me

Or another now but rather working to fix the nozzle

In place – and as he walks around to replace

His gas cap I confirm that the shirt is indeed

Inside out because the care instructions tag

Is affixed to the left seam of his shirt and it is

Flapping in the wind.

Other clues become apparent – a collar that

Will not quite lay down, an odd faded look

To the stripes, and a quarter inch seam sticking up

On either shoulder and around to the armpits . . .

And I keep a moment of wonderment

For the man with the hungry, searching eyes

Who does not know by either sight or sense

Or design – that the shirt his own body wears
Is inside out. 

Live Nativity

I was driving back to my hotel room in Murphy, North Carolina after a long day of visiting a relative in the local nursing home.  My take-out dinner was in tow on the front seat of my car – North Carolina mountain trout and Yukon gold potato mash and sautéed green beans and Caesar salad – I was almost there, to my hotel room, where a bottle of Pinot Noir awaited me too, when I spotted a sign on my way up Holiday Inn Drive -- and it pointed to a steep hill just past where I meant to go, the sign reading, Live Nativity, December 17, 18 and 19, 7 to 9 p.m. 

I felt the car make a sudden jerk to go up that steep gravel hill where the sign pointed, at the same time hearing a voice inside of me say, today is December 17 and it is just past 7 o’clock and it will take only a minute and the trout will be fine . . .

Once up there, I was not sure what to do, for another sign said to turn off my headlights – and mine have been on 'auto' ever since I’ve owned the car and I don’t know how to override the intelligence of my vehicle on this.   Besides, I did not know if I should park the car or where I should park it, for there was not a parking lot but only a few cars lined along the gravel road atop this hill which was really more like a ‘mountaintop’ than a hill.  I could see movement within a crude open hut over to the right of me, and there was a small group of people dressed in gowns and robes and head gear – and all was silent and very dark on that mountaintop.  I felt very intrusive and out of place, and I started to lament my decision – and so I kept driving forward, hoping the road would lead me down the other side of the hill and away from the embarrassment of having sharp headlights that I could not turn off only because I did not know how to.   But the road did not lead down the other side, and I was forced to turn around and repeat my intrusion with the glaring headlights past the live nativity scene. 

And as I did so, I saw three men come toward my car with waving flashlights.  I was sure I would be reprimanded by each of them, and so, as I approached the first man, I slid down my window and apologized for the headlights being on 'auto' and told him I would leave now – but he said, no, no, that’s alright honey, you just drive on through past the nativity – and that meant I was to take a slight left turn to get into the loop of the drive-by . . . and when I did that, the second man came up to my window and I slid it down again and said the same thing, apologizing for not knowing what to do with my car – and he looked in at the confusing headlight dial and said, you don’t worry about it, dear, some cars will do that way . . .  now you just follow around the circle and don’t you worry . . . and so I came to the third man who also approached the car to, no doubt, remind me of the headlights still on, and I said the same thing to him – that I was so sorry and that the other men had pointed me on anyways, and I felt really bad about blinding everyone's eyes and I didn’t know what to do – and he smiled and said, that’s OK, sweetheart, you just enjoy the nativity . . . and he waved me toward the crude open hut . . .

As I approached this solemn scene, I could see that Mary was holding a real live baby in one arm, but that she was having to lift the other forearm to block the glaring headlights of my car – and yet, she smiled at me as broadly as any new mother, and she also used that uplifted arm to wave at me energetically and joyfully.  I saw Joseph to her left side, proud as any new father, smiling broadly too.  He endured the headlights and did not block them, but only bowed his head slightly and tried intently to look toward my car window to wave at me.  As my vehicle inched forward, I saw that I was now blinding the three wise men to Mary’s right – for they were all lined up in a row and wearing colorful robes and carrying receptacles that were no doubt replete with gifts of frankincense and myrrh.  But they squinted and smiled at me and waved energetically as though eager to share their good news.  I noted also that there were live donkeys and goats and even dogs curled up on the ground near Mary.

It was a beautiful nativity scene, just the way I had set up under the family Christmas tree when I was a child, arranging and re-arranging the ceramic characters as though they were parts of a dollhouse that came down from the attic only once a year.  This one was life size, however – and it was alive – and it was more friendly and happy and kind than I had ever imagined one to be.  For even when I had circled the scene and was about to descend the hill toward my inn where I would have a silent and thought-provoked dinner, the first man I met that night came up to my car window to thank me, and I once again apologized for imposing my glaring headlights on this dark and silent night upon a steep hill in the North Carolina mountains – and he once again said to me, don’t you worry about that, honey, we are just so glad you could come to witness the nativity with us.

A Few Steps

It was just happenstance, when I pulled into the parking lot for my yoga class, that I found a spot next to a van of which the side door was open and a man was standing next to it while two young boys were waiting with an old red wagon at the rear of the van and a woman was just beginning to walk around from the driver’s side . . . and I somehow already sensed what was to come out of that van door.

Once outside of my car, I saw the man, supposedly the father, reach into the back seat to lift out the family dog and place him carefully/tenderly in the wagon which the two boys held steady – and by then I had already retrieved my yoga mat from the rear of my car, and I saw the sunglassed face of the woman, the supposed mother – the boys and the father wore sunglasses too – but the mother’s grief could not be disguised by her sunglasses, for her lips trembled and she could not look toward me. 

  

It just so happened, without any contrivance, that I was to walk in step with them toward the building where we both went – they, toward the veterinary clinic on the right; and me, to the yoga studio on the left – but before we diverged, in those few steps, I instinctively wanted to place my arm around the mother – but I held back, since no words or acquaintance or eye contact had been made between us – and perhaps it is my imagination, but I almost think she had leaned toward me in the way I wanted to lean toward her, but that she also held back as I did . . .

Instead, with no thought as to the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the authentic emotion I held, I said to her, “I’m sorry” – and that is when her emotion poured forth; and the boys too, betrayed by the purpose of those sunglasses on them, they too began to cry; and the father, stoic as he tried to be, could not deny what he was feeling and began to melt in the face . . .

The few steps we shared in the parking lot ended as quickly as they began, and I veered to the left while they veered to the right – and my parting words, not wanting to leave them in that condition but all I could say in the short space of time and distance we still shared, my last words to them were, “I understand” – and just as I said those two words, the lame dog, who looked more like a very kind red wolf than a dog, that lame dog brightened up in the eyes and put one leg out of the wagon to escape it, perhaps to go to my side of the building – all the strength it could muster – and the two boys jumped to put its leg back in, and the mother yelped softly as though this were all a mistake after all, and the father slowed his pull of the wagon and turned around just to be sure, but the dog submitted . . . or had used up its strength. 

As I continued my solitary walk to the yoga studio door, I felt the tears well in my eyes and my head naturally bow.  Once inside, I kept my sunglasses on, for the tears were escaping from both corners of both eyes – a betrayal to myself and to all the giddy noise making women inside the yoga studio lobby.  I shook off my flip flops and found the room I was to go in, my sunglasses still on, while I greeted the instructor and briefly noted what I had just seen – “Ohhhh . . .  I had to do that,” she whispered with such emotion that I bent down to unfurl my yoga mat without looking at her.   

Once the room was darkened and the drone of the instructor’s voice had begun and I was alone on my mat, I took off the sunglasses and lay on the mat with my eyes closed, a few burning tears making a path down each temple and pooling uncomfortably at each inner corner – my sleeve dabbing at them over and over, only to be replaced by more – an inconsolable dabbing – and all through yoga class I could only think of those few steps that carried so much weight between us – people and a dog I don’t even know – and of those few words that were so inadequate but all I had to give – I’m sorry and I understand – no solution, no excuse, no stay of execution, no escape from the red wagon – how powerless we are to quell the most obvious and natural and universal of pains – nothing I could say or do to make anything different for them. 

I’m sorry and I understand – the only words this non-angel could muster in those few steps she took with a grieving family and their dog.  I repeated them over and over in my mind, as though they were a mantra, all through class, each time imagining the loving arms of some real angel or goddess or invisible being that could hear me from my yoga mat in the darkened room and go to the clinic next door and somehow do the thing that I could not.  

Speckles

Inspired by a quote from Gary Snyder’s book, “The Practice of the Wild”

Back when I had time to write only

poems, I’d spend the speckled parts of

one day reading the thing that was penned

by inspiration in the shower – changing

a word or letter or comma, here or there – till

the thing was quite fixed over by day’s end, and it was

all done in those flecks of time, for I had all

the daily vacuuming to do, the black and white

kitchen tiles to mop – and many full meals –

and much washing and bed making too, for

nothing was short changed or skipped – and  

yet I wrote the poems – about housewifery, most

of all, for that was my vantage, and the seeing of

speckles and dapples and shine even when

the dull tedium added up to nothing, everyone knows

housework has that reputation, must be

shined and polished daily, and even then, it’s at

best a pot or pan, window, mirror – face it . . .

to most.  I’ve never had the authority

to call it more or make it sound

like a way to polish one’s life, or to live in the

present moment, or to say it was the

“highest calling of my 24 hours,”

which I read in a book the other day – the highest calling

of the 24 hours, and so I laughed to think that   

herding children into a carpool van, or shifting numbers in

major business plans, or directing people in the role of

boss or dictator – that it’s all the same, the most important

work of the hour, he said. 

I have struggled to think the same, make myself feel

more than I was, all in the practice of making dull shine;

I have made the black squares blacker

and the white squares . . . whiter.  It’s the practice of the

kitchen floor shine, albeit bent over, and

knowing dullness and routine and the hour.

It is not lofty work, not even to me, the one writing

this poem at the hour – and I have no authority

to make it sound so, not from this inner vantage, still bent

over this or that – it is a practice, to stay alert,

a path of sorts, to walk or skip or drag the feet

along black and white kitchen tiles – everyday, the hours . . .

in spite of dingy

windows and carpets and walls – days when

everything is cast as shadow and blur – always the practice of

finding speckles and sparkles to keep one stepping,

one more day, another chance

to practice it, to get it right, to make the

black tiles blacker, a comma act brighter, or white tiles  

whiter.

Fully Workable Hands

Coming home for breaks from college in the 70s, I would sometimes ride with a young man from a neighboring small town.  I knew he liked me-liked me, and I felt so uncomfortable with him that I often, I’m sure, said nothing at all on the six-hour drive home, except to answer his endless questions as succinctly as possible so as not to encourage him.  I knew he was searching for a date with me because of the types of questions he asked, such as, “What do you do for fun?” and “Do you like movies?” and “What kind of music do you listen to?” and “Do you like to dance?”  There were other signs too, of which young girls are acutely aware. 

I don’t remember his first name, but I remember his last name started with a G, because at one point he said, “We have that in common, both our last names start with G!”  That made me laugh.  G was friendly and outgoing and smart, and he is what people called back then a “thalidomide baby.”  He had very short arms that stopped somewhere up around the biceps, and small hardworking hands that emerged from the short-sleeved shirts that he always wore.  His chest was folded forward and his upper back was stooped from a lifetime (19 or 20 years) of having to function with arms that never reached a school desk, or a tabletop on which his fork and plate were placed, or, in this case, the steering wheel.  As he drove, his chest was nearly lying upon the steering wheel and his chin was touching the top of it, while his hands grasped each side at 10 and 2 as we’d been taught to drive back then.

He showed no self-consciousness of his condition; this was simply the way he knew his own life – just as I am accustomed to arms my own length with the relative “handicap” of not being able to reach across the room.  But I was young and extremely self-conscious at the time, and I tried always to avoid looking at him in the driver’s seat as he talked endlessly and asked questions to draw me into the whirlwind that he seemed to create with his hands as he drove and gestured.  I’ve always known better than to say this, but G’s hands were disturbing to me, poking out of his short sleeves as they did, like heavy wings that were trying to fly away.  They were small and somewhat deformed, and they worked so fast and independently of the rest of his body, that it seemed like two additional people were there in the car talking to me.  His hands did all the work of pointing and waving and gesturing and alternately steering the wheel.  Once he asked me what kind of car I liked.  I had no knowledge of cars back then, and no anticipation of owning a car, and no opinion about cars – but he kept pointing at cars, every one that passed us, lifting his hands and pointing and calling out the make and model and even the year, until finally I said, “I like that one.”  It was a Karmen Ghia, he told me, and that kept him silent for one minute.  Many years later when I owned my first car, that is the car I owned.  G was that kind of person, always working hard to engage the world around him – a whirlwind – and I suppose he influenced many people with that manner of his.               

But I was the person that I was, very introspective, self-conscious, and content to be quiet.  With G or not, I would much rather have looked out the window for six hours, thinking about the books we had been reading in literature classes I was taking – or any number of things I liked.  My favorite author at that time was Sherwood Anderson, and my favorite book of his was a collection of interconnected stories about the characters in a small town, called Winesburg, Ohio – and my favorite story in that collection was called “Hands.”  It’s about a man named Wings Biddlebaum whose hands are always nervously fiddling about as he talks.  In hindsight, I don’t know if I noticed G’s hardworking hands because of that being my favorite story, or if “Hands” became my favorite story because of noticing G’s hardworking hands.  It was all related.

G was studying pharmacy at UNC where we both attended, and he would one day take over his father’s drug store business in the small town near mine – that was his plan.  His father had provided his mother the thalidomide when she was pregnant with him – my mother told me this, for people in small towns, even neighboring ones, know these things – for her nausea, and of course no one knew at the time what the effects would be.  My mother said this one time after G dropped me off at our house and politely came inside to greet my mother and to shake my father’s hand.