Ironic Chef

I inherited some surplus baking supplies from a pal whose daughter worked on one of those elimination cooking shows. Every time I crack open the jar marked “rice syrup” I wonder how it all went wrong. When did it become entertaining to watch people cook like they were bailing water from a paper lifeboat? What must all that anxiety taste like? Give me an hour of Julia, Martha, the cagily Sinovescent Yan, or even the avuncular but dodgy James Barber anytime over witnessing some idiot sweat into his Saskatoon berry reduction while another bigger idiot rips him a new one.

Image: Detail from Stephan Yan, Wok With Yan (1981)

You, Tube

The Smithsonian tells us we share 98.8% of our genome with chimpanzees, but that hardly reveals us to ourselves in any new light. Now, from Belgium, comes a study showing we have 96.3% in common with annelida oligochaeta, the common earthworm. So very many nuances of human nature are explained in this fell swoop. The lingering popularity of the name Ann. Our affection for undergrounds, whether inhabited by the French Resistance or by hobbits. And of course, the disarming comforts we feel around tubes. Think tube tops, toddlers lulled by toilet paper rolls, and jagged mornings smoothed with Euro caviar.

Image: K. Bischoping.

Moving in Soon?

We’d eventually take over a house the bank had repossessed, that someone had left in a hurry, taking the stove and the fridge on his way out and tossing what food he still had in the sink.

     The second time through, we still weren’t entirely sure, but that certainly didn’t stop me from taking along a few things to clean up a house I didn’t yet own, gathering up the worst of the garbage, soaking the kitchen with Lysol, and doing what little I could to get rid of the stink of the previous owner before the heat kicked in.

Images from Between Heaven and Hell by Jacek Yerka, 1989.

Bonne fête ma chouette

«Es-tu mal au ventre, maman?» Every year on her birthday, mom would ask her mother if her stomach hurt. Mémé, who produced a bakers dozen, never got the significance. But most of us remember birthing our babies. Twenty-two hours of labour took me from insisting I deliver in a salt-water bath, the air replete with the sounds of whales and patchouli-scented vegan candles to maniacally screaming “Get that fucker out!” By the time the catheter arrived, I saw yoga and sheep breathing for what they were: chimerical hippy hogwash. But I’d have done it again in a heartbeat.

Photo: Zebra Photography

Raiders of the Lost Schmutz

So they found King Richard under a car park. Now that’s a dig. Back in the Jurassic when I trained as an archaeologist we did a field school in a parking lot. Filled with salady earnestness, I thought we’d discover something: The lurid tracings of Matthew Elliot’s slave cabins or Tecumseh’s moldering head—Essex County treasures just waiting to be unearthed. Instead we amassed a greenhorn’s cache of Styrofoam cups, nails, and broken glass. Turns out our slacker prof hadn’t applied for a field license. We were lucky we weren’t arrested or press-ganged to work the Scrambler on Boblo. Photo by P. E. Reid

A Proliferation of Popes

Yesterday two Popes lunched. We smiled; it seemed so sunny. We should've been afraid. I don’t mean just Catholics worried that Benedict might cleave the Church with a chance utterance about preferring pickerel to cod. Rather, as the moral majority of Star Trek viewers should've known, a space-time discontinuity had formed. Francis is but the first of the Popes who’ll be popping in from alternate dimensions. Come Tuesday, Popes will fill our screens, like in the old “Which twin has the Toni?” ads. About a week later, the exponentially-growing mass of Popes will tweak Earth off its orbit. Goodnight moon.

Intercourse

On our trip back from the Jersey Shore, we passed through the town of Intercourse, a small town in Pennsylvania with a shop on one side of the road—selling assorted knick-knacks and quilts made by the local Amish—and a lonely motel on the other. I insisted we stop, hoping to find something to add to my collection of kitschy souvenirs, but we really should have stayed overnight, if only to have the town come up in conversation one day, and so allow us to dismiss it with the weary cynicism of the seasoned traveller: “Been there, done that.”

The Potato Salad Mystery, part three

Adela rootled in the cutlery drawer, but her forks and spoons all lay dispiritedly in the still-clogged sink.
     “I hate my life,” she thought, turning back to the potato salad that she supposed the cleaning lady had left behind. It wheedled forth aioli and memories. Of a picnic spread on a chequered cloth on the Riviera, and a man feeding her fingerling potatoes with sandy, long-fingered hands and…
     Adela stopped short. “I've never had a boyfriend,” she thought crossly. “Let alone a cleaning lady.” Somehow, being near that salad was giving her memories of another life, better than her own.

Part one *  Part two

The Potato Salad Mystery, part two

Enticingly unctuous, the tang of aioli wafted up her nose and she found herself salivating. It was seven pm after all, and any ounce of satiety gained from that penitential gluten-free bean bake she scarfed at noon had long since evaporated. And here sat fingerling potatoes dotted with chives and dusty paprika. The temptation to eat this Trojan Horse of a supper was strong. But wasn’t it just last Saturday that she watched The Apartment? Who was in her house and left this behind? Could the cleaning lady be entertaining gentlemen on Tuesday afternoons, fueled by lust and high-end carbs?

Part one  *  Part three

So Hip It Hurts

After months of relatively unsuccessful chiropractic treatment on my hip, Dr. Ho now thinks it might be my sacroiliac that’s causing the pain.
      “There’s something we can try…” he says with a grin that suggests he’s as reluctant to tell me as I’ll be to hear it. And he’s right, because what he wants to do is inject anaesthetic directly into the joint, and if the pain goes away, it will confirm the underlying problem.
     Understand, shoving this needle into the base of my spine is just part of the diagnosis.
     I don’t even want to think about the cure.

Image based on a drawing posted to The Dance Training Project.

The Potato Salad Mystery, part one

When Adela Littleshank came home that night, the last thing she expected to find was a container of potato salad sitting on her kitchen table.
     She checked the back door: still locked. She yanked her bedroom closets open, peered under the bed, and inched the shower curtain back, ready to shriek: no one. Yet, in the kitchen, this potato salad, provenance unknown.
     Not quite unknown, she corrected herself; the salad bore the label of a rather upscale deli.
     It’s an upscale hallucination, she thought, poking the container to see if it was real. It was, and in fact, enticingly cool.

Part two  *  Part three

J + R

It wasn’t the sort of thing I normally did, but there was this wall, you see, down a long alley off Queen . . . a dull expanse of pale brick under decades of dirt, until someone had discovered—who knows when—that the brick had gone soft.
     And so began a long crude chronicle of young romance, white letters scratched into the grime, the successes and failures of those long gone and those still hanging onto the memory of a piece of gravel and a few minutes of carving for the ages to see, perhaps wishing now it hadn’t been so easy.
Photo © 2010 by The World Beckons. All rights reserved.

The Heart of the Storm

Outside the plate glass window, the storm slings flinty chips of snow into the shocked cheeks of the New Yorkers. It rips at Whole Foods sacks of tinned kidney beans and kelp snack storm provender; it snaps up five umbrellas – two floral, one stripy – at the corner of Ludlow and East Houston in a single skip of what must be a cold, cold heart.
     But inside the storm: il laboratorio del gelato, where a dish of spheres awaits. The marble grey is black sesame, slowly showing a toasty warmth; the off-white is lychee, its sweet breath perfumed like a succubus.

Image: Lynn Huang on foodspotting.

Seasons in the Sun

To this day, I have trouble getting all the way through Seasons in the Sun. It started in 1974, and although I am pretty sure Terry Jacks was singing of cancer or suicide or something like that, his song enjoyed a perversely high rotation at our classroom parties, probably because it was so perfect for rocking back and forth slowly and hanging onto a girl as tightly as you dared, amazed at the heat two bodies could generate, and telling her so, saying anything that came into your head, just to draw attention from this strange thing you were doing.

These weren’t the parties we’d had in Grade Six. Something new had taken over, pulled close the curtains, and turned out the lights. There was music, but no one dared dance, and so the girls at the record player would conspire to set up the most unlikely couples in what they called a “snowball.” They’d announce the names, and I’d have to slow-dance with Karen Carstairs for an excruciating three minutes and twenty-four seconds, then Beth Parker, and finally Brenda Duffy, except the joke’s on them because Brenda was probably the only girl in class at all interested in me.

The Shadow Stranger

Behind you, a stranger waits in the shadows. Not with a knife in hand, not with oiled whispers, nor with a trenchcoat lined with knockoff watches and a tale of woe. A quiet stranger, a stranger like you but unlike, with a left side like your right and vice versa. A stranger who kneels beneath your chair and leans her forehead against the wall, who licks at its white leaded paint and tastes the white as darkness, and dark as light. She hopes you’ll play a record soon. The sound of all that silence in the room just deafens her.

Photo by Melodie McDaniel
For other posts inspired by this image, see The Mag.

The Truth about Rudolph

My young friend Carrie’s favourite Christmas song is Rudolph. I can’t blame her. She’s grown up in an era of ardent anti-bullying messaging, and is a really nice person to boot. But here’s the thing, Carrie: Exactly when in history has a member of a visible minority group reviled by dominant society and excluded from joining in any children’s games suddenly been hailed with shouts of glee for saving the day? “Then all the reindeer loved him”? Not bloody likely. Odds are they kicked poor Rudolph to death with sharp little hooves the minute Santa went for the gin bottle.

Image: Animated Film Reviews.

Snotty

She shuffles through High Park everyday. The homeless lady in the long, mustard-coloured coat carries a green pop bottle and puffs on cigarettes, drawing rapidly the way a child would. Profoundly phlegmmy, she death-rattles into reams of toilet paper, leaving streamers in her wake or piled upon a bench.
     These soggy wads are canine quesadillas: white-soft on the outside, chewy and salty inside. It drives me crazy, but just imagine the one-sided conversation I would have, perhaps catching her on my way back to my warm, safe home: “Excuse me . . . my dogs eat your tissues, and it really, really bothers me . . . ”

Image from: Dog is My Co-pilot

It’s a Common Phrase Down Our Way

“Heureuse-année, grand nez!”  Admittedly a gambit, I said this to the young guy at our local cheese shop. I hear him speaking French all the time.
     Holding a wedge of Applewood, he hairied an eyeball. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
     I persevered. “You know . . . it’s New Years, I say ‘heureuse-année grand nez!’ and you respond, ‘Pareillement, grande dent!’”
     “What language is that?’
     “Fren-ch.”
     He asked where I was from, but others had entered the shop, and now I was just the crazy lady monopolizing the cheese-guy’s time.
     “Tecumseh.” My last attempt.
     “Oh.” He smiled, wondering where the hell was Tecumseh.

Image from: CafePress

Gimme the conch, Bitch

For years, I’ve quoted from Lord of the Flies without ever having read it. Last Sunday I finally finished this classic, in all its exquisitely nasty detail and immediately pondered a scenario where girls rather than boys were marooned on that island to fend for themselves. Well, forget hunting and pigs’ heads on spikes.  The beast would just have to be mollified with coconuts and flowers. And everyone would be cleaner with braids. But if my memory of the mean girl Petri dish that was St. Gregory’s serves, there would still be a Piggy, and she’d end up dead anyway.

Image based on a photo by Tono Baluguer.

That Fixed My Wagon

I bought a wagon from Home Hardware when I moved into this neighbourhood and have come to depend on it as much as any suburbanite depends on his minivan. I use it to go grocery shopping, I use it to get Nola to her dance classes, I use it to return my empties . . . but when one of those proverbial squeaky wheels finally gave out last month, the wheels were literally off my wagon for weeks, and I was grounded until I could figure a way to detach the parts that had rusted together, and then find my bearings . . . again, literally.

More wagon adventures here.
Photo by PLR Photo.