Read Online Coming into the End Zone by Doris Grumbach - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Doris Grumbach
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alive in a bad time.
The absence of TV and radio and the ten miles we would need to drive to town for a newspaper are no deprivation. They are a respite, a lull in the customary, numbing avalanche of human misery and despair, the decline, perhaps the imminent destruction, of the race.
We have dinner with our friends up the road. There is kiwi fruit in the salad. I had always thought kiwi was a long-beaked bird to be seen in New Zealand, but recently I have learned it is a fruit with a rough brown skin and tart green interior. Very fashionable. I have tried it before but cannot develop an affection for it.
I realize that foods introduced to me in childhood and adolescence occupy all the available space for acceptance by my taste buds. Mousses, spaghetti squash, pastas of all sorts, radicchio, pita bread, and a hundred other new arrivals on menus: I cannot grow to like them. My enduring passions for food are tied to ancient memories. When I was five, my nurse took me to a pork store on Broadway. The butcher offered me a slice of liverwurst, the casing carefully removed. I still shiver when I think of how wonderful that taste was; I still try every kind of liver sausage in a vain attempt to recover the intense pleasure of the first piece.
I remember the first spear of fresh asparagus, bathed in butter, that my mother offered me. It has never tasted quite the same since. If ever I am blessed with a garden I will try to grow that wonderful vegetable in an attempt to recapture the initial bliss. Other such irreplaceable memories: the first sweet potato, creamed spinach from a glass box at the Automat, mashed turnips and carrots, the soft remains from the broth of a boiled chicken: carrot, celery, livers and gizzards, parsnips and onions, one glorious mishmash of flavors, eaten from the strainer with a wooden spoon. Wonderful.
No kiwi, no papaya or mango, can come close. My tongue and taste glands are incapable of further education. If there is not a long, comfortable, worn precedent for the food, it is now too late. I grew up in an age of somewhat colorless American cooking; the new interest in foreign and native cooking has passed by my old-fashioned palate.
The last, fine day on the bank of Morgan Bay. I have not grown weary of looking at the water, doing nothing, thinking idly in a haphazard sort of way. Thoreau began his book Cape Cod (I have an edition republished by Houghton Mifflin in 1896 with delicate little watercolors by Amelia Watson that appear in the margins of the text) by denying this is so. âWhen we returned from the seaside, we sometimes ask ourselves why we did not spend more time gazing at the sea; but very soon the traveler does not look at the sea more than at the heavens.â How long would I have to stay before this indifference set in?
Before we leave Maine to go back to the humid, unpleasant city, I telephone Richard in San Rafael. His voice is thick, as if his tongue were swollen.
âI have thrush,â he tells me with an effort. I think first of a small speckled brown songbird, shake my head angrily at the inappropriate thought (much as I had last night to kiwi), and say something stupid like âI see.â Then I remember. In the old days, children got thrush, white spots in their throats, a fungus, I think. Richard, my young friend, so hopeful when last I saw him, is now host to a childhood affliction, together with all his other adult infections.
Washington. I come home to the mail, an avalanche of brown boxes and envelopes, about fifty review books for the ten days we have been away. My daughter Elizabeth, who lives around the corner, has watered the plants, fed the fish, and stacked books in large piles. The mail fills a post office bin. I think of something I read recently, by Marina Tsvetayeva: âI am indifferent to books.⦠I sold off all my French ones; whatever I need, I shall write myself.â This would be a good resolution for me.
Sybil has gone off happily
The absence of TV and radio and the ten miles we would need to drive to town for a newspaper are no deprivation. They are a respite, a lull in the customary, numbing avalanche of human misery and despair, the decline, perhaps the imminent destruction, of the race.
We have dinner with our friends up the road. There is kiwi fruit in the salad. I had always thought kiwi was a long-beaked bird to be seen in New Zealand, but recently I have learned it is a fruit with a rough brown skin and tart green interior. Very fashionable. I have tried it before but cannot develop an affection for it.
I realize that foods introduced to me in childhood and adolescence occupy all the available space for acceptance by my taste buds. Mousses, spaghetti squash, pastas of all sorts, radicchio, pita bread, and a hundred other new arrivals on menus: I cannot grow to like them. My enduring passions for food are tied to ancient memories. When I was five, my nurse took me to a pork store on Broadway. The butcher offered me a slice of liverwurst, the casing carefully removed. I still shiver when I think of how wonderful that taste was; I still try every kind of liver sausage in a vain attempt to recover the intense pleasure of the first piece.
I remember the first spear of fresh asparagus, bathed in butter, that my mother offered me. It has never tasted quite the same since. If ever I am blessed with a garden I will try to grow that wonderful vegetable in an attempt to recapture the initial bliss. Other such irreplaceable memories: the first sweet potato, creamed spinach from a glass box at the Automat, mashed turnips and carrots, the soft remains from the broth of a boiled chicken: carrot, celery, livers and gizzards, parsnips and onions, one glorious mishmash of flavors, eaten from the strainer with a wooden spoon. Wonderful.
No kiwi, no papaya or mango, can come close. My tongue and taste glands are incapable of further education. If there is not a long, comfortable, worn precedent for the food, it is now too late. I grew up in an age of somewhat colorless American cooking; the new interest in foreign and native cooking has passed by my old-fashioned palate.
The last, fine day on the bank of Morgan Bay. I have not grown weary of looking at the water, doing nothing, thinking idly in a haphazard sort of way. Thoreau began his book Cape Cod (I have an edition republished by Houghton Mifflin in 1896 with delicate little watercolors by Amelia Watson that appear in the margins of the text) by denying this is so. âWhen we returned from the seaside, we sometimes ask ourselves why we did not spend more time gazing at the sea; but very soon the traveler does not look at the sea more than at the heavens.â How long would I have to stay before this indifference set in?
Before we leave Maine to go back to the humid, unpleasant city, I telephone Richard in San Rafael. His voice is thick, as if his tongue were swollen.
âI have thrush,â he tells me with an effort. I think first of a small speckled brown songbird, shake my head angrily at the inappropriate thought (much as I had last night to kiwi), and say something stupid like âI see.â Then I remember. In the old days, children got thrush, white spots in their throats, a fungus, I think. Richard, my young friend, so hopeful when last I saw him, is now host to a childhood affliction, together with all his other adult infections.
Washington. I come home to the mail, an avalanche of brown boxes and envelopes, about fifty review books for the ten days we have been away. My daughter Elizabeth, who lives around the corner, has watered the plants, fed the fish, and stacked books in large piles. The mail fills a post office bin. I think of something I read recently, by Marina Tsvetayeva: âI am indifferent to books.⦠I sold off all my French ones; whatever I need, I shall write myself.â This would be a good resolution for me.
Sybil has gone off happily
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