confused and distraught this will have to serve – face it these loom large these days
Driving to work this morning, I was listening to a collection of articles by Jim Harrison in a book posthumously published titled, A really big lunch (New York : Grove Press 2017).
It is a collection of Mr. Harrison’s articles about food, cooking and eating,
In the introduction by Mario Batali, Mr. Batali wrote of Jim Harrison, “…and nothing makes a cook quite so happy as someone who exists entirely to eat — and when not eating, to talk about eating, to hunt and fish for things to eat, or to spend time after eating talking about what we just ate.”
Mr. Batali also wrote that Mr. Harrison was someone … “who wrote sentences that stretched beyond the wildest poetry of my imagination” and I could appreciate that.
Still these are essays about eating, hunting and fishing for things to eat, and talking about what Mr. Harrison just ate.
Maybe not the best thing to listen to first thing in the morning especially for someone who still gets by on just coffee please until I wake up enough around lunch time to think about putting food in my system.
I made it through Mr. Batali and then through the first essay titled, Eat Your Heart Out, a discussion of commercially available hot sauces (in 1981), the rain was pouring down, I couldn’t see and much as I enjoy Mr. Harrison’s prose, I said to myself, “… time for some music” and as the car eased off the bridge onto the island where I work, I reached over to switch from audio books to music.
In that second before the click registered on my handheld, the next essay (Food for Thought as published in Smoke Signals 1982) in the queue stated to play.
I heard the first two words of that essay before it stopped.
I heard, “Dear Mike ...”
And it went off.
Well, boy howdy but that kind of freaked me out.
I had to hear what Mr. Harrison was writing to me.
I switched my device back to audio books and hit play.
I heard the last bit the previous article that I had just heard and then once more I heard, “Dear Mike …”
“I am so confused and distraught …”
And I hit stop.
That’s all I needed to hear.
Confused and distraught.
Like Castor and Pollux, the twins of the Gemini, confused and distraught.
The full sentence, I later looked up is, I am so confused and distraught that this will have to serve as my food letter for the upcoming issue. Let’s face it, the twin specters of food and politics loom large these days.
Food I am not so much worried with.
But politics?
And of much else in life?
Confused and distraught.
Remember Potiphar in the Bible?
According to the Genesis 39:6. Potiphar … “did not concern himself with anything except the food he ate.“
Did not concern himself with anything … ANYTHING, except the food he ate.
wilderness of waves, dip and dive, rise and roll, hide a desert of waves
The sea is a wilderness of waves, A desert of water. We dip and dive, Rise and roll, Hide and are hidden On the sea. Day, night, Night, day, The sea is a desert of waves, A wilderness of water.
Long Trip by Langston Hughes, in Poetry, compiled from poems published between 1921 and 1928.
