Vegetables

I fell into possession of this huge dictionary of vegetables, the history of each one and where it came from, and I lost an entire day. Who knew rutabagas could be so interesting? Aunt Sadie used to fry slices of rutabagas, or sweet potatoes, or white turnips, until the sugars converted. This is alchemy. A starch becomes a sugar and caramelizes. The word ' tomato' comes from the Aztec zitomate. A few more morels and I limit myself to an omelet, toast with pepper jam. I saute the mushrooms in butter, then make a sauce with the butter to pour on top. As my Dad often said, "we're in the tall grass", which can mean a great many things, but usually meant 'good fodder' since Dad grew up just one step above share-cropper, and fodder, for humans and animals was always a consideration. B's brother, Ronnie, made hominy this year. I don't know a single other person that makes hominy. I know one person who still makes sorghum syrup, at a loss, and I know several people who live on boats. Right now I know a great many song-writers and composers, I've always known builders and designers, always writers, wherever I happened to be, and a group of marginal people that generally seem more centered than the great mass that chose, early on, to compromise. Kim called, to verify he would be here for an extra day in early June, just before Diane will be here; two people in fourteen days, a veritable onslaught. I'm looking forward to it, hearing about the outside world; I get so involved with simple words, pate, saute, satay, that I lose track of time. Hours later I'm reading about watercress, and I remember some watercress and sweet butter sandwiches at a theater benefit, it must have been in Boston, I almost never went to these. But free food is a powerful draw, and those small triangular sandwiches were very good. Most of the food was pretty good at the meet-and-greet events, and the champagne flowed freely. Gentle rain on the metal roof draws me back to the present, where I'm grown more frail, and my body fails me, but I'm surprisingly comfortable with growing old. I'll die alone, there's little doubt of that, it could be a week or two before TR or B found me, spirit departed, carcass impregnated with fly larva, another corpse in the endless cycle of dying.