Eating an Apple

I snatch a store-bought
‘Snack apple’ from the bowl,
Small, red, and tasteless
Like the ones on the tree I’d
Balance on a sloped sapling hand-rail
Stuck in cement stairs on
Our hill to pluck from,
Without the dusty taste I loved,
Though, yes, deeply hued.

A bite: brown veins cut
Through the meat.
Mud-soft craters at the stem.

For some reason, all my third grade classmates
Are watching, suddenly, at red lunch recess tables.
They scream and laugh, and the tallest kid
In class, a orange-haired girl who swoons for Spice Girls,
Standing on my picnic bench, grabs
My apple with an “Ew!” and throws it in a bush.
The classmates congratulate her and me
On our near escape from imperfection, mush, and
Shame and eat their Cheetos, grinning broad.

Here, in great-grandma Marion’s
Pea-green creaky chair,
Looking at my yard, I grin too,
And keep on biting.

Mother’s Day Math Problem

After 32 Hours in Pacifica

baking cheesecake with Mom,
wrestling James,
tickling John Mark,
losing with Joey against Emily in Egyptian War,
picking wildflowers,
riding the ATV through the eucalyptus forest,
chasing deer,
watching the creek,
jumping on a trampoline,
climbing a tree,
exploring a garden,
painting Easter eggs,
hiding Easter eggs,
reading Copeland and Chekov,
walking the dog,
sipping nectar from watsonia and nasturtiums,
watching the ocean,
listening to Wendell Berry read aloud,
exchanging banana slug stories,
watching dad cut up firewood with a chainsaw,
inventing alternative high school class rubrics,
showing and telling for Grandma and Grandpa,
listing French films with Mom and Uncle Jeff,
weaving through six-year-old redwoods,
eating waffles, bacon, and spinach omeletes,
laughing,
smelling lavender and sage,
falling asleep with the dog,
chewing sourgrass,
getting a backrub,
singing hymns,
listening to Gaga, Palestrina, Whitaker, and Nora Jones,
foraging for cheese and crackers,
walking through daisies,
following swallowtails,
talking design with Helena,
and breathing fresh air,
.
I’d say it’s been a pretty good day.

Three Things

One. Driving Toward the Sunset.

I grew up in Pacifica, where watching the sunset meant going somewhere and stopping.  We had to.  The water starts a mile away, we weren’t into kayaks, and haven’t yet become holy enough for the whole walking-on-water stunt, waves or no. Now, I love going somewhere and stopping to see the sunset.  There’s quite a bit to see (that’s kind of the point), and the focus afforded by a fixed location is quite valuable.  But.  Two days ago I became consciously aware of the distinct and magnificent pleasure of watching the sunset while driving toward it.  (I’m vaguely ashamed that this is the first time I can recall noticing it after five years in L.A.  *Must pay more attention to everything.)  Bends and curves in the road became facilitators of that dependable intensification strategy: the hide-reveal-hide-reveal-hide-hide-slow reveal.  All the fun of strong contrast heightened by the use of negation itself as one of the binaries!  And when one gets to hilly bits, the ground starts to seem less secure than the emblazoned welkin (pardon my language) above’t.

Two. Paradigmatic Colors: Incarnate!

Yesterday, the color of the trees and sky here could have been taken out of a sheaf of construction paper or a basic box of crayons.  They were the colors of children’s drawings and of everyone’s ideas “tree” and “sky.”  What!?

Happy subsequent (re-)realization: the correspondence of real stuff and personal idea(l)s is one of our chief-est-er-est-er-li-est pleasures.  Hooplay!  Unhappy subsequent realization:  This correspondence was stand-out-ish-ly significant to me, so my visual paradigms must not correspond to reality very often or well.  Hm.

Three. Jazz is Yellow.

I know this because as I was driving back from work yesterday, I turned on the jazz station.  As soon as the music started and without my willful instigation, I was suddenly and powerfully more conscious of the color yellow everywhere.  In sprinklers.  On walls.  In trees.  In the speckles that show up on earlyish- or lateish-lit asphalt.  My conclusion: Jazz is yellow.  Except when it’s blue.  Rebecca reminded me while at work today that it’s very blue.  Rhapsodically blue.

Also, jazz may be characterized by boxy shapes with rounded edges, because that’s what I noticed this morning when I turned it on.  I’m suspicious, however, of the suggestion; I may have been trying to recreate yesterday’s revelation.  I think I was.  Hm.

Aha!

The Penniless Bachelor: Remedial Cooking Number Two

So, you have that brown rice your brother made in a little bit too much chicken broth.  The stuff with the texture of mashed potatoes that tastes really good with butter on top.  The thing to do is, when your housemate comes home with takeout from his date at a Chinese restaurant, make sure the chilies (covered in all that orange chicken goom) make their way onto the top of the rice mash, and let it sit overnight.  Or two.  You might shake it around every once in a while.  That’s all.

The Penniless Bachelor: Remedial Cooking Number One

When one is all but Hubbarding, the spice cupboard is a source of culinary salvation.

Time: Dinner.

Available: pasta, generic & cheap tomato sauce (dubiously monikered “three cheese”), a fifth of a bar of mozzarella cheese, sourdough bread, and discount Walmart “honey baked ham” sandwich meat.  And spices, infinitely inherited from four households of college students and modestly augmented as sales permit.

Solution: get a huge stack of sandwich meat slices, and cut it up as if it was a slab of ham.  Grate all the mozzarella.  Boil the pasta.  Drain the pasta.  Replace the pasta.  Oil the pasta.  Add pasta sauce right on top of said pasta.  Add (GENEROUSLY) Curry Powder, Coriander, Cilantro, generic “Italian Spices,” Sea Salt, and 2/3 of the cheese, until stringy.  Taste and add (GENEROUSLY) more, to taste.  Add ham chunks, ignoring their dubious origins.  Serve.  Top with the rest of the mozzarella.  Add a hunk of sourdough bread.  Emphasis on hunk.  As opposed to slice.  Pour milk into a teacup.  Grab a sharp green apple from somewhere.

Serve to brother.

Watch his eyebrows.

Eat.  Slowly.  Feel.  Flavors. Progress  As.  You Swallow.  Oh.  Curry.  You.  Are.  Divine.  &.  Etc.

.

Oh, and, incidentally, Addendum:  The meal will turn out better if prepared while listening to Holst’s Jupiter.  It will taste better if eaten while listening to it again.