Seattle 148, or And It's Beginning to...

When it snows in Seattle, the collective head comes off and the proverbial (and actual) chickens start running around. Or, rather, people turn into idiots. Real idiots. Idiots who would try to gun it up a hill that's covered in ice with cars close in front of them. Idiots who don't know how to control a skid. Idiots who don't have chains for their tires, don't own snowboots, and seem to think sledding is best done when wildly intoxicated.

The roads are closed. There are no snowplows. There is no salt or sand, or that disgusting organic molasses byproduct that got really popular in Massachusetts one year. In any self-respecting temperate climate, this would be a non-issue. The snow stopped around 2am - it could've been cleared by 5. But it wasn't. Because there are no g-ddamn plows.

I worked a 14 hour emergency shift, because I could walk to work instead of relying on the buses. It took one of my cowokers six hours to make her 20 minute commute. A new client was dropped off at 2am because the highway turned into a parking lot. The school expects at least two, maybe three snowdays from this.

I'm not leaving the house until I have to. I've got my nice cozy fire going, and promises of rice pudding, and I will leave the insanity where it is, thank you.

But I will say this: there is something wonderful about a pink sky over snowy evergreens, and the companionable silence that comes from empty roads.

Seattle 147, or Ode to Joy

When the rain comes like a cold scolding, I do my best to brighten the kitchen.

(or, as this case may be, an ode to my father)

(can't claim these - they're Joel's. But I know how to make them.)

(Skagit River Ranch bacon is the only kind I've ever had that beat Oscar's.)

(purple cauliflower! who knew?)

(Apple and onion pie, inspired by Laura Ingalls Wilder.)

Seattle 146, or A Joke to Share

I had a moment somewhat like this, recently.

After months of negotiation with the authorities, a Talmudist from Odessa was finally granted permission to visit Moscow. He boarded the train and found an empty seat. At the next stop, a young man got on and sat next to him.

The scholar looked at the young man and he thought: This fellow doesn’t look like a peasant, so if he is no peasant he probably comes from this district. If he comes from this district, then he must be Jewish because this is, after all, a Jewish district. But on the other hand, since he is a Jew, where could he be going? I’m the only Jew in our district who has permission to travel to Moscow.

Ahh, wait! Just outside Moscow there is a little village called Samvet, and Jews don’t need special permission to go to Samvet. But why would he travel to Samvet? He is surely going to visit one of the Jewish families there.

But how many Jewish families are there in Samvet? Aha, only two – the Bernsteins and the Steinbergs. But since the Bernsteins are a terrible family, so such a nice looking fellow like him, he must be visiting the Steinbergs. But why is he going to the Steinbergs in Samvet? The Steinbergs have only daughters, two of them, so maybe he’s their son-in-law. But if he is, then which daughter did he marry? They say that Sarah Steinberg married a nice lawyer from Budapest, and Esther married a businessman from Zhitomer, so it must be Sarah’s husband. Which means that his name is Alexander Cohen, if I’m not mistaken.

But if he came from Budapest, with all the anti-Semitism they have there, he must have changed his name. What’s the Hungarian equivalent of Cohen? It is Kovacs. But since they allowed him to change his name, he must have special status to change it. What could it be? Must be a doctorate from the University. Nothing less would do.

At this point, therefore, the scholar of Talmud turns to the young man and says, “Excuse me. Do you mind if I open the window, Dr. Kovacs?”

“Not at all,” answered the startled co-passenger, “But how is it that you know my name?”

“Ahhh,” replied the Talmudist, “It was obvious.”

Seattle 145, or Poem-a-day #309

Raizl, Forhenwald, Bavaria, 1945

The Red Cross worker
says, in halting Polish,
“Don’t you like the soup?
It’s not my mother’s,
but at least the meat is real.”

How can Raizl explain?

Meal after meal,
she sits, clutching her spoon,
eating less than a bite,
naming the pieces of food:
this one is Aleksy,
(he loved potatoes)
this pepper, Elzbieta,
(who we called Erzi,
because she was Hungarian,
and moaned
that our food had no taste)
this piece of meat,
Jaga, gone,
just after the liberation,
as though she knew
her work was done.

“Maybe it’s too hot?”
says the Red Cross woman,
reaching to touch the side
of Raizl’s tin bowl.
When she finds it cold,
she shakes her head.
“Look at yourself!
You need to eat something;
you look like you just
came out of the camps!”

Raizl imagines
pinching a piece of meat
between her thumb and forefinger,
touching it to Aleksy’s lips,
leaving a meatgrease kiss.
They were all so hungry.

Seattle 144, or Cider House

When I got the invitation, I almost squealed out loud. A cider pressing, in the next neighborhood over, at the brightly painted co-op. Bring your apples - your bruised, your half-eaten, your yearning to be crushed and poured and savored. E had a rickety old press, borrowed from yet another co-op, which featured a PVC pipe for a crank and so little glue we sometimes held it together with our knees.

When I arrived, groaning bag slung over my back, I found the beginnings of an assembly line. I slipped in to share a cutting board, grabbed a knife from the wall, followed the labeled cabinets to a towel and colander, washed my apples and joined the group. A child sat at the table, doing math problems. Her mother sat next to her, knife in hand, talking and tossing cores into a bowl. We chopped until we filled the stock pot - big enough to bathe in, it came nearly to my hip.

Dinner materialized when it got dark - the long kitchen table slowly moved from apples to potluck - beet salad and fresh bread, my sundried tomato-walnut pesto over pasta, ghost-shaped cookies, banana muffins. The house was full, and noisy, everything spilling over. I took a break from the press, prowled the common rooms of the house, let the surroundings tickle me: a bathroom sink, disconnected from its pipes so the water dropped straight into a bucket to be used for flushing the toilet. A labeled cabinet by the front door reading "extra blankets." Copies of letters written to company heads and political figures. The hall table with the blank name tags and jar full of markers, with specific instructions to include one's preferred pronoun. The hall telephone with the sticker "this phone has been tapped by order of the US Patriot Act." The jerryrigged feat of a kitchen.

It turned out that only E and I knew how to use the press - how to dump the chopped apples into the hopper, grind them down and then use the wooden paddle, the giant screw, and the apples' own weight to press until juice ran in sweet, thin rivulets into the bucket. Each cycle took about twenty minutes from start to finish. I remembered the cider party at Red Truck, the honey harvests from my childhood, Apple Days when visiting Marlboro. This party had the same harvest joy, the sticky hands of plenty.

After three nonstop hours of pressing, we had about five gallons - not counting the stuff we'd drunk in celebration or sent home with people. Most of it went into the basement - E wanted to experiment with fermenting it. I walked home with a mason jar of cider cradled in my sweater, sweet, grimy fingers, delight at seeing my breath. Autumn, indeed. Who needs foliage when there's cider and early sunsets?

Seattle 143, or poem-a-day #300

They ignore me, mostly.

Not impolitely -

they are obedient

as crocuses,

perfectly willing

to take the broom

or mop

or towel

and complete their chores

without my asking,

or to say "good!"

and flash me a thumbs-up

when I serve them food.

We color together;

today we carved a pumpkin.

They cracked roasted seeds

between their teeth, suckled

the salt.

Their conversations

bounce across the rooms,

missing me each time.

My workday

is not quite loneliness

or boredom,

but draws a card from each.

Sandra comes out of her room

with a plastic bag in her hand,

offers the contents around.

When she reaches me,

I look into her palms,

take a piece of dried fruit

covered in spices,

take a bite.

I smile, flash her a thumbs-up.

"Bueno!"

She chatters at me in Spanish

for a few seconds,

before both our faces fall

in that familiar way

of Babel.

Finally, she says

"Mannngooo"

and

"Mi Mamaaa,"

with a kind of patience.

I smile.

"Mango - tu mama."

And she smiles.

And we nod,

chewing,

this other woman's home

reaching my throat.

Seattle 142, or Tastes of my new home

Autumn in Seattle leaves me an odd mix of restless and sluggish. There's lots of news: I have a new job, working with homeless youth. It's different than my old job; they're older, more functional. No restraints. No side-hugs. No laundry. No monitoring every conversation between clients. Clients that can sustain a conversation, though - that's awesome.

Last week, I started craving chopped liver. It's not something I ate all the time as a kid - just often enough to remember how much I liked it - earthy, salty, with hints of egg and onion. In my grandmother's Queens apartment, they served it in a cut glass bowl. I pinched mouthfuls when no one was looking; the adults always spread a thin layer over crackers and rye bread. "Too rich," I was told when I asked for a spoonful.

Sometimes, when my other grandmother was roasting chicken, I'd catch her before she tossed the liver and beg her to fry it up for me. She always did, muttering about cholesterol as she flipped it in the pan.

At the store, they sell them frozen, six or seven in a package, for cheap. I looked up a few recipes online, found the basic ingredients and set to work. The livers went under the broiler, salted, their thick smell stampeding through the house. Masha came home, smiling. My once-Swiss landlord came by, leaned against the counter and took a long sniff. "We used to fry them in butter, as hot as we could," she said. I explained why I was using olive oil, mincing onions to throw in the pan after the livers.

She stayed while I mixed, boiled and chopped, eating slices of the rye bread I'd bought to go with it. No time to start a fresh sourdough.

The smell of onions is home. The smell of liver is comfort, the promise of luxury to come. The eggs, perfectly hardboiled and chopped, turn it creamy, as does the spoonful of unorthodox mustard. Landlord and I eat half-sandwiches, topped with little vinegar pickles in the late afternoon sun. She closes her eyes as she chews, saying "it's different, of course, but you can't beat that taste. It's so humble."

This is me making home: a collection of tastes and smells and sounds that didn't come from anywhere but my own heart. It's the most honest thing I know how to do. And you may not see where it came from, may call it pretense, fabrication, construction - there are so many names for the things we don't understand, the things we also call G!d.

I am telling you: this is where I come from, now. I come from my kitchen, wherever it is.

Seattle 141, or Poem-a-day #276

The Bravest Thing My Mother Ever Did

was not the years of shoulderpad armor,
of being the only woman to slip
and chew her way to the board rooms
and corner offices,
but what happened after:

the night she told us
she couldn't do it anymore,
she asked our permission

to put her compass
in her pocket
and ask the stars
for directions.

When I consider
how alike we are,
I don't know how she did it -
wandered restless
for so many months,
believing she could do anything.

Seattle 140, or Gratuitous Food

For a girl who hated melted cheese in most forms, it surprised everyone when I turned into a mac and cheese hound in college. This particularly decadent effort includes a cream so thick it had turned to butter in the bottle, three kinds of cheese - cheddar, feta and pecorino romano - sundried tomatoes, shredded greens and sauteed mushrooms. Baked in my trusty cast iron, of course.

My father hates beets, but he enjoyed the purplish carrots in this pile of roasted veg from the summer. The carrots, I am sure, came from the eccentric gardener a few miles down the road who runs a plumbing parts store out of the back of his mother's house. He grows the sweetest tomatoes I've ever had. And, when he's in a good mood, he lets me harvest carrots.

An early-summer study in simplicity - the fava beans were an experiment, to see what I could pull off. I don't recommend making fava beans alone. There's simply too much labor involved to only serve one person. One requires at least one admirer. The bread is pumpernickel, from the bakery. The egg, from my egg lady at the market - the one who sells goat meat and asks me about my knee. The beets and favas came straight from the farm box that gets delivered once a week in the summer.

Seattle 139, or Sukkot

And when we have fasted, prayed, felt the twisting of our bodies and hearts, cried out to the heavens (to ourselves?) for forgiveness, and when there is nothing left inside...

we build. We reach. We put up walls made of cloth, and a roof of branches and say, "Come in. We've spent the last week figuring out that life is only as solid as the winds and the rain will allow, but today there's sunshine. So, come. Sit. Feast."

All photo credits to Debs Gardner.