Respuesta a un amigo poeta y los muertos de Ayotzinapa

Amigo, 
El dolor es profundo y la culpa de nuestra banalidad, nuestra comodidad, nuestra ceguera, o nuestra mirada abismalmente limitada, es casi infinita. 

No. Es infinita, honda y redonda la culpa que nos abarca, que nos abraza, por ser humanos, y a la vez inhumanos. 

Por nuestras prisas y pequeñeces. 
Por desear más de lo que merecemos, consumir más de lo que necesitamos. 
Por querer sólo a nuestros seres queridos, y sumar en una fosa común todo lo olvidado, lo inalcanzable, lo que nos agota, nos agobia, nos destroza pensar, todos los cuerpos que se vuelven desechables por distar de nuestra realidad inmediata, de nuestra óptica, de nuestro entorno, clase, raza, etnia...

Y por eso no pensamos. 
Y por eso, pensamos.
Pienso.

Nostalgia kitchen

I inhale deeply. The smell of curcumin, curry, cumin, toasted caraway. These smells take me back to the small co-op in Media, PA that imprinted on my 5 year-old olfactory memory, three decades ago. The creaky wooden floor, the hemp-woven grocery bags, the tight aisles of teetering metal shelving, and the glass storefront...all this before it was hip. All gone with trickle-down economics... I can definitively say that if I never see carob chips again it will be too soon... but today, perusing an article posted by a friend from this same era of life, a friend whose family was delightfully large, and hippier than mine, and from which my longings of a farmhouse with scads of children scattered about me are most likely a product, I consider the health benefits of turmeric for cerebral antioxidation and I am struck that dinner can proceed.

Last week, driving home from California, world-weary, tense, a bit melancholic (the Eucalyptus in the fall always reeks of a broken heart, what can I say?), but also hopeful despite the throes of adolescent depression in my sweet girl child, we decided, the girl and I, that she needed to learn to cook. She has always left the kitchen to me, perhaps afraid of my imposing command of the small spaces that we've called home, perhaps just afraid of me, for my sharp tongue and biting exigencies, of her, of myself... But, after a particularly difficult bout of accusations, and my injured silence, somewhere between Chiriaco Summit and Blythe, with a blinking empty fuel tank light, we decided it was time for her to learn how to cook. We proceeded to enumerate dishes and types of food that I would teach her, me promising patience, and she promising follow-through. We have yet to cook together, but I am sure it will happen. In the mean time, I will write these thoughts for her, too. In case I'm not always around. In case this is all the family that I can ever muster around us for good. (That fear seeps out, the words push it back in).

In an homage to my mama and our typical Friday night fare, a few days of the week early, and eaten half-standing in the kitchen as is my custom (nasty habit? the child asks me to sit with her and I oblige), rather than with blessings and challah, and peanuts and shredded coconut and basmati rice.
 

Honey curry chicken with roast broccoli (my twist, of course)

A chicken breast (all I had) or two (if you actually plan meals, rather than rescue from your fridge), split.
A few pats of Irish butter... because grassfed milk is yellow and delightfully flavorful and worth it
A quarter cup of local honey (for immunity and to combat local allergens)
3 large tablespoons of madras curry powder (which was, admittedly a bit old and less potent than I would have liked).

Spread the thick honey curry paste over the chicken with pats of butter above and below. 350 degrees. 25 minutes, turned over, basted with sauce, and another 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, roasting broccoli that has been laid on a lightly oiled cookie sheet and sprinkled with lemon pepper and Himalayan pink salt.

She didn't want to eat, but after I enticed her with my own three strips, she was the one that beckoned me to the table of our little house. I don't know if I will feel like a grown up, you know, the way that you are supposed to be, like I imagine my parents were when I was small, together, a united front. I failed to make that a reality for my girl-child, but, I do what I can. Patching things together with friend-glue where a family ought to have been.

Decadence

My mind, unsullied and limpid from a relatively good night’s sleep, I open my portal to the vast pulsing universe to find myself confronted with more pain, fear, death. There is wild and irresponsible fear about the spread of Ebola, fear that lumps the hundreds (thousands?) of black African victims into nameless, faceless statistics, aggregating their lives out of meaning, and the blaming of other victims, female victims, who are caretakers, for their purported recklesness. There are Nobel peace-prizes for children that are survivors and champions of their own and other’s right, while these same children might be collateral damages in drone strikes that feed a gaping maw of greed, oil hunger, machines of industry, power and money that erase the individual histories of thousands, their broken bodies unaccounted for. There are other broken, burned, bruised and beaten. The 43 missing students in Mexico, the deathly collusion of government (or its absence) police and narco-war lords to punish those who speak for themselves and for others, the other mass graves, the unknown bodies, missing but unclaimed.

How to make sense of it all? My heart hurts, and I cannot will myself to do the detail-oriented tasks that call to me, the last minute details to make sure that my probationary review file is absolutely complete, with no inconsistencies or false claims. Crossing t’s, dotting i’s, tears streaming down my face for the injustice of it all. I tell my students, weekly, that there will never be a utopian happy ending, there is no perfect system. We are, after all, humans, and because of this, we are inherently flawed, sometimes evil, often selfish. Momentarily kind. There is not a love big enough, I know, to shelter me, to shelter my girl from all this pain. I wonder if I should allow her to go out to a fair. What if something happens to her? What if one of her friends is an addict? What if a boy, or a man, decides to hurt her? It is terrifying, but I tell myself that I can’t hide her from this world, cruel as it may be. I can’t wrap my arms around the universe and hold it tight. It is unbounded. It expands and slips past our reach. It becomes something else. Every. Single. Time. But I try, nevertheless, to push back. That’s what I tell my desperately disheartened students who week after week discuss the failings of a Western optic and supposed human rights frameworks. We push back because the evil will encroach, we push back because love is a powerful force, and even if human kindness may never do more than reach stasis in the face of human evil, maybe, just maybe, we can hold the evil at bay.

So, I debate how to approach my day. Friday. I arrived. This week, unlike the weeks before I was neither addressing a plumbing disaster, nor running an event, though I am preparing my home for another visitor. I was neither feeling my heart ache for the distance imposed by another person that I love, and whose needs at this time are simply in opposition to my own, nor the panic of work piling up (though that is more a function of sleep than of said work, trivial though it is in the grand scheme, being complete or diminishing). I will go to a café to work, I think. And I start to plan this, but the wind and rain are enticing in this desert city, and instead I take the dog, desperate for action, out for a constitutional. I allay thoughts of self-loathing, of an imperfect self, pushing back against my own overinflated ego. I come back, and I think, “I will work now” but then I discover that though I am trying hard to not waste, to not consume more than I need, there are vegetables and cheese that came from the farm, homemade, that if ignored will go to waste.

How to make sense of it all? I wonder, from within the walls of my temperature controlled space, clean despite its clutter, free of shrapnel, or land mines, though the ominous plane formation that coasted along in the morning grey made me and my girl nervous. If I waste, I think, then all those people that are struggling for fairness, for justice, for peace… I am letting them down. If I waste, it means that the water and energy used to produce these things, the nameless, faceless farmworkers who labored under the sun for miserable wages, but wages, I hope, nonetheless, will have worked for nothing. If I waste, I am part of the problem, not part of the solution. So, I cook. And in the cooking, and in the feeding of others, I will make a moment of sense. The narrative will relent, for a moment, and I will just be, immersed in the earthy abundance, free.

My mind plays with the possibilities, using mostly things on the edge of spoilage, and I come up with a new recipe that speaks to abundance and decay.

Casserole of decadence:

Toss together:

·      Tri-color (beets, spinach and wheat pasta) rotini – boiled and set aside.

·      Large crimini mushrooms, quartered and wilted in olive oil and salt over a high flame

·      Quartered roasted Brussels sprouts

·      Roasted butter nut squash, skin on, cubed

·      Sauce

Sauce:

Eggplant, garlic sauce added to fresh tomatoes on the edge of expiration. Add chipotle pepper and water let cook down over medium high heat.

Add homemade chevre and salt to taste, allow piquant sauce to marry flavors.

Crumble more chevre over top. And bake.

Sometimes the only logic is to not think too hard. To let yourself be. To practice self care. Sometimes there is no meaning, but we still have to eat, and appreciate the beauty. Sometimes, it is all we can do.