Our friend John in Salt Lake thinks to have identified galactic debris as the forensic reason for why I am how I am.
True enough, those grapefruit-sized things were everywhere in my hometown. Our lawn looked like a bocce court. It made autumnal leaf raking impossible.
One crashed into the kitchen and splashed down in the large pot in which my mother was always boiling spinach for me and my brothers. (No lightly wilted leaves for her. She'd boil a mess of it right out of the can until it had lost all color, and then serve it doused with white vinegar.) "Leave it in! Leave it in!" we screamed.
"Perge modo et qua te ducit via dirige gressum," said Venus to Aeneas.
6 comments:
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I don't know who l am
But you know life is for learning...
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devils bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
You have gone and triggered music flashbacks with this post, damn you. Now this song will be with me for the rest of the day.
I on the other hand have been reminded of some of the more egregious culinary crimes committed by my own dear gray haired mother. I will never forget canned peas as long as I live. No matter how hard I try to forget.
It just made me think about the TV show "Smallville."
I'm afraid of what that says about me.
My newspaper customer Mr. Gourley owned only one other thing as highly prized as his collection of heavy black jazz 78s in thick cardboard sleeves, hundreds and hundreds of which lined cases covering the walls of his grandly shabby house: a three foot tall meteorite.
It had a fractured peeled onion layer appearance, like a boiled egg shelled before it had adequately cooled. His ancestor had had it pulled by oxen team from the shattered garden wall at the end of the long trench slashed by it's arrival, and set on a granite slab, later surrounded by poison sweet smelling jonquils.
On spring evenings he would stand in the open side doorway of the sagging gingerbread house, jazz flowing out of the stuffy parlor behind him, over the steps and into the hostas and tiger lillies, and, unsteady against the peeling jamb with a glass of buorbon in his hand, watch it slowly disappear into the grasp of the long black shadow fingers of sunset.
He tipped well.
damn, a falling rock in the spinach? my mother would have come unglued.
you remind me of the spinach that drove me home nearly every Friday from First Lutheran Elementary. the Friday menu of brown beans, cornbread, peach pie and spinach was one i detested and if i could not feign illness and depart, i'd pay others to eat it for me. excepting the peach pie, those are now favorites.
but yes, lightly wilted is preferable, though it's tasty with vinegar when overcooked.
My mother still thinks potatoes and carrots should be boiled until they are mush. I suspect I was malnourished as a child because we only ate canned foods.
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