the meals in your life
are numbered and the number
is diminishing

Food.

Jim Harrison.

Guilt.

Great way to start the day.

I live in a country that is somewhat obsessed with cooking, eating, weight and weight loss while at the same time unthinkable numbers of people, children, unthinkably go to bed hungry.

I read and enjoy the author, Jim Harrison but of late I have been listening to his work while I drive to work.

Audio versions of a book make sure you hear every word.

I think I have developed a mental screen that allows me to read Jim Harrison and filter out the worst of Mr. Harrison’s … earthy soliloquies* … while focusing on his word play, sentence structure and word painting observations on life that make him one of my favorite authors.

When I LISTEN to his work, read out loud and mispronounced (If I hear MACK-i-NACK one more time …) you cannot ignore those earthy soliloquies and gee whiz but he can get to the edge of social ridiculousness and go over.

And starting my day thinking about food and Mr. Harrison leaves me with a feeling of guilt.

So what to do?

Should I feed the hungry?

Should I make an apology for Mr. Harrison?

And I have only been up and about for 30 minutes.

So I heave a sigh and I say out loud a line from the Savannah based movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

The line that goes … “Two tears in bucket … mother f*ck it.”

(Okay so I faded on spelling it out … but it’s a word we have all heard)

And I am going to comment on the dinner my wife made last night.

And I going to quote Jim Harrison without apology.

Last night my wife slow cooked a pork tenderloin in barbecue sauce and made pan fried sweet potatoes with Parmesan cheese and served it with rice.

There are meals where I can lose myself in the food, the flavors.

I look up, mists clear from my eyes and time has passed and my plate is empty.

I think of that Ben Franklin quote, “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.“

There are times when I feel that way about food.

I remember the place in the Bible where the picnic cloth filled with food comes down in front of Peter and God says, “don’t say anything I made is bad.“

There were no man made food additives or improvements included in that spread.

Nothing ‘fat free.’

Nothing ‘reduced calorie.’

Take and eat, said God.

I enjoyed my dinner.

I was reminded of other good, great meals, both simple and extravagant in my life.

I wondered how many have I had?

How many good, great meals does one get to eat in life?

I thought of a line from Clarence Day’s Life with Father where Mr. Day writes, “I adjusted my cap and walked on, thinking over this future. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to be a civilized man. After all, I had had a very light lunch, and I was tired and hungry. What with fingernails and improving books and dancing school, and sermons on Sundays, the few chocolate éclairs that a civilized man got to eat were not worth it.“

Then I thought … How many good, great meals do I have left to eat?

And I thought of this passage from the 2011 essay, Chef English Major, by Jim Harrison that is reprinted in A really big lunch(New York, Grove, 2017)

Cooking becomes an inextricable part of life and the morale it takes to thrive in our sodden times.

A good start, and I have given away dozens of copies, is Bob Sloan’s Dad’s Own Cookbook. There is no condescension in the primer.

Glue yourself to any fine cooks you meet.

They’ll generally put up with you if you bring good wine. Don’t be a tightwad.

Owning an expensive car or home and buying cheap groceries and wine is utterly stupid.

As a matter of simple fact you can live indefinitely on peanut butter and jelly or fruit, nuts, and yogurt, but then food is one of our few primary aesthetic expenses, and what you choose to eat directly reflects the quality of your days.

Your meals in life are numbered and the number is diminishing.

Get at it.

Have to admit food is not the part of my life that it once was.

Sorry and sad to say that since moving to the south and its pollens and mud flats, my nose is not what it was and flavors are not what they were.

Oddly I get the subtle flavors of seafoods like shrimp and scallops over the blunt heavy flavors of a good steak.

Lucky for me I live near the sea.

Nevertheless, I appreciate food and the good foods and flavors that God has packed into that picnic cloth.

Again, I thought of a Jim Harrison passage.

It is a from one of the first essay’s of Mr. Harrison that I read and one that got me into the Harrison’s camp.

This is from the 1989 essay, Hunger, Real and Unreal that was reprinted in Just before dark : collected nonfiction, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1991)

.. one day at lunch I told some plumpish but kindly ladies what I thought was a charming story of simple food. One August, years ago, I was wandering around the spacious property of a chateau up in Normandy, trying to work up a proper appetite for lunch.

Two old men I hadn’t seen laughed beneath a tree. I walked over and sat with them around a small fire. They were gardeners and it was their lunch hour, and on a flat stone they had made a small circle of hot coals. They had cored a half-dozen big red tomatoes, stuffed them with softened cloves of garlic, and added a sprig of thyme, a basil leaf, and a couple of tablespoons of soft cheese. They roasted the tomatoes until they softened and the cheese melted. I ate one with a chunk of bread and healthy-sized swigs from a jug of red wine. When we finished eating, and since this was Normandy, we had a sip or two of calvados from a flask.

A simple snack but indescribably delicious.

I waited only a moment for the ladies’ reaction. Cheese, two of them hissed, cheese, as if I had puked on their sprouts, and wine! The upshot was that cheese is loaded with cholesterol and wine has an adverse effect on blood sugar. I allowed myself to fog over as one does while reading bad reviews of one’s own work.

I read this bit to my Mother and she laughed and laughed and laughed, shaking her head the way she could.

Let me circle back and sum it all up.

Food is a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy, but the few chocolate éclairs that a civilized man gets to eat may not be worth it.

So?

Quoting Mr. Harrison again, “Eat the delicious fat and take a ten-mile walk. Reach into your memory and look for what has restored you, what helps you recover from the sheer hellishness of life, what food actually regenerates your system, not so you can leap tall buildings but so you can turn off the alarm clock with vigor.”

*scenes of a sexual nature that may or may not have anything to do with the plot …

are those miracles
you affirm wrought formerly,
wrought no longer? Why?

Why, they say, are those miracles, which you affirm were wrought formerly, wrought no longer?

I might, indeed, reply that miracles were necessary before the world believed, in order that it might believe.

And whoever now-a-days demands to see prodigies that he may believe, is himself a great prodigy, because he does not believe, though the whole world does.

From City of God by Augustine (XXII.8-Page_488)

Why are there no more miracles?

Are there no more miracles?

Maybe I should ask, what is a miracle?

The online dictionary says it means, “… a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.”

I am not God.

That isn’t much of headline but worth noting.

Because if I were God it would be miracle that I didn’t revisit the Noah story with the idea of looking for a way around the promise of the rainbow.

If I were God and read that there had been a promise along with the rainbow that the world would never again be destroyed … in this way (by a flood), I would figure I had a whole lot of other ways at my command.

That I didn’t call up something to destroy the world every day for the disappointments the people of the world caused me, THAT would be a miracle.

… maybe it is.

God holds back and everyday the sun comes up.

Maybe that is the miracle, the surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and must therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency, behind the sunrise.

A daily something to believe in.

random roll of dice
is potent force as any …
shift in the weather

In his book Then Everything Changed,” Jeff Greenfield writes:

“History doesn’t turn on a dime; it turns on a plugged nickel,” and that history “is as much a product of chance as of the broader forces at play.”

“Geography, topography, ethnicity, ideology, climate, natural resources, the search for wealth, mass migrations, all set the framework; but the random roll of the dice is as potent a force as any,” he writes. “A missed meeting, a shift in the weather, a slightly different choice of words open up a literally limitless series of possibilities.“

Forget history.

Take everyday life.

Switch.

Click.

And it’s a different day, week, year, life.

No warnings.

No gaurantees.

No google maps.

And its all wrong in an instant.

Don’t tell me about intentions.

As that bit of verse about the car wreck that goes:

He was wrong
and I was right
but I was just as dead
if he’d been right …

Sometimes its rocky and sometimes you don’t notice I guess.

I am reminded of CS Lewis and the Screwtape Letters where Mr. Lewis writes:

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Most times you just don’t see it coming.