Bubbie's Cookies

Peanut oil, you must use peanut oil or the flavor won't be accurate; add eggs, sugar, baking powder, and enough flour to mix to the right consistency.  Roll out thinly, sprinkle amply with cinnamon sugar, cut into strips and roll portions into neat little coils.  Dip these in more cinnamon sugar and set them on end, standing up, so that the baking tray appears to have a company march in progress.  Rows and rows of cookies were being made by my incoming daughter-in-law's mother, brother, and me.  I got to roll strips, which was an honor, being that it was in the synagogue's basement kitchen, and therefore, the kitchen is kosher.  

But it was said that I was permitted even though I am a, geez, what am I?  I don't consider myself Christian or anything, so does that still make me a gentile?  Is gentile supposed to be capitalized?  Well, it was fun, anyways, and part of the charm besides the excitement of the marriage and the 100 year old building was getting to canoodle with Dorian.  You learn a lot about Judaism from her, a lot about life.

Her husband stopped by as she wasn't permitted by law to turn on the stove; this is a duty my son has also performed for the family at gatherings and holy days when Jews who keep kosher are not supposed to create a flame, which is considered work.  By work, the law includes the turning on of lights, for the flipping of the switch completes a circuit, thereby breaking a prohibition against construction or building on Shabbat in Orthodox rule.  It gets complicated, but I am thrilled that the family is welcoming my son who loves their daughter.  You haven't been around the block until you see your agnostic son in a yarmulke.

The baking process was lovely to watch, as measurement was done mostly by eye, with flour added a pinch at a time by son as the batter becoming dough was stirred by mother.  A simple recipe handed down from great grandmother, taught to be done by hand without a written script; it's also semi-secret.  No one else knows the formula, and that is a good way to keep family close, by not telling them anything about how you make their favorite dishes.  "Bubbie" is Yiddish for grandmother, "Zaidi" means grandfather.

When he was little, Bri would go next door to the Sicilian family who stuffed him with Stracciatella, a spinach and egg soup.  Spinach?  Eggs?  My kid?  A miracle!  This child would keep his peas in his mouth; when I would check on him in bed before turning in myself, there would be a trail of peas on the pillow.  What was the big deal, just swallow them already, you can't live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pepperoni all your life.  We want your brain to develop, eat some vegetables, a bite.  One spoonful.  Nothing happened until A-1 Sauce was discovered and then that went on e-ver-y-thing.
I never figured out why the food next door was being shoveled in like sixty; anchovy foccacia, for heaven's sake.  Cookies I understood: cuccidati, ossi di morti, reginella, ricotta, and pasticcini.

He's grown to appreciate different cuisines, and is a master of many; he's learned kosher cooking and can handle himself around Orthodox Jewish dietary law.  Rather proud of Buzz; he's amiable and curious about life, two good traits to have.

Food is intertwined with tradition, handed down generation to generation; I still have a biscuit recipe from Brian's great-grandmother, Granny's Rolls; there are Bubbie's Cookies, Mom's Chop Suey Casserole, and Mary's Ravioli, with the dough rolled out forcefully, given dollops of ricotta, then another sheet of dough;  finally scored with a pie wheel.  Lovely, light ravioli in a thin tomato sauce; I sat and ate and watched so many years ago, while Mary sewed my wedding gown.  

What tradition are you carrying, or long for once again?  A whole dinner or a special recipe?  It reveals something of where you came from, what helped shape an outlook, even if it's simply cereal doused with butter and baked.  And of course, one can begin a tradition as well, a thread that hangs a small bell over each head to ring memory in of the hands that stirred, folded, rolled, or pulled volcanically bubbling dishes from the oven.  Dorian let me share in that today, and was more than generous in not noticing the lop-sided shapes I was manufacturing.  Hers were straight.

The day was full of rain and chill, so baking in the synagogue's kitchen was an antithesis to the weather, sprinkled with cinnamon, as was the warmth given by the welcome to another, new family.  As sleep and hours wend their paths through the night, visions of Bubbie's Cookies will dance in my head; follow your own ways, notice what soothes you; a voice, a favored composer, a library, a solemn wooden bench over which hangs an icon, a cathedral of green under trees in the woods, a purr, a woof, or a finch warbling its song as you walk on sidewalks below.  Meanings become symbolic emblems of emotion that rekindle a time now far away, stirred by connection to who and what we love.

Maybe a blanket tonight; the cold slides against the glass panes and emanates into the room, the rain patters gently, cats are dozing, I am tired.  Climb in, tuck under, use the hypnagogic space of consciousness to explore thought, just before the borderland of sleep opens its silver gates.  Remember.  







  

Story

What would you like this evening; the wind is ripping around the corners, pulling at the latched windowpanes, and there is time for a tale, but which?  A story, a fable, a history, a lament to pull your heart into secret cupboards, or a persuasive on the determination of kindness that will lay a pillow down for your toiling head and heart?  There is science, observation, and the foundations they build from the cut stones of research; research anything and you will have an obelisk of knowledge that stands in your backyard, whose shadow reaches over faraway sacred rivers and open tundras.

But now, what would you like to hear, to distract you from the storm of life?  I can open your furthest dreams, bring back a memory, give you time; I can give you time.  Now don't worry, it isn't invasive and really, it's your own self that does the work; I turn keys and illuminate hallways, but you are the one who knows where you are going.  Do you remember.  Did you ever.  What was it like. Stirring visuals return, yearnings tug at an old screen door banging in hot summer dust.  Where were you, at what age?  Was it grand?  Was it too long? Was it a ribboned box that produced a glass paperweight?  Ticket stubs, pressed handkerchiefs, letters, a toy; all have an assigned time in your life, telling markers measured out by clepsydras and wheels.

I knew of a person torn pretty much in two by the illusion of dogged honor, which planted itself directly opposite the elusive freedom of following a happy desire.  Contrary to the rings of conversation, the path of integrity was much easier to stick with day after day, for there was comfort in performing the usual tasks, a phantom of safeness.  People will say that doing what's right is the harder nobility, but therein is a disagreement; integrity, while admirable, may kill you. Stand at guard, stay the course; you will remain in place, forever petrified.  Are you harming anyone or dunning your responsibility towards the ill?  No?  Then run like the wind, but remember, you have just made the harder choice.

To capture your heart's deepest wish takes a hell of a lot of work; Aladdin's lamp is non-existent, not even a dollar coupon will fall from the sky.  It takes years of dedication to an empty coffer, with the happy goal seemingly further away while you develop and grow, take chances, get a job, and eat cheap.  But you are gaining ground, out from under whatever thumb you've created in your ego that held you down like a millstone.  Religion, family expectations, assigned roles, or the social climate of where you live will sit their fat arses at the top of your spine and whine that you're wrong.  Most of you who are sane or better, you aren't wrong at all.  Keep going.  Be the outlier.

Time is removed as months and years blur into monotony from study, getting up at odd hours, finding a pair of cables to jumpstart your car; it can be excruciating, but inside, you will feel the happiness of finding who you are and what you love. There will be good people along the way that you can share your findings with; this is not a selfish endeavor, but one of self-discovery, of joy, and that means there are many like-minded folks out there traveling on the same journey.

Is success one hundred percent guaranteed?  Nope.  Nothing is, not even gravity, which varies in strength around the planet.  Yes, it's a chance, a risk.  But you're alive, and curious as a ferret; go find what's out there, and in spite of not reaching a desired goal, what happens along the way is well worth your time and effort.  

So, how does your story end?  Full of gratitude and appreciation for each second brought in harmony with your beliefs, when the actions you undertook culminated not so much in an explosive, glorious, singular conclusion, but as a series of auspicious blossomings that build a lovely enough cluster leading to other pathways.  Other chapters, other pages; for you see, there is no conclusion. Take hope, a drink of water, and charge the nib with India black; the paper curls past the table's edge and puddles on the floor in luxurious serpentine cockles. Scribe down what you are in ink, history will not remember electricity or words assigned to echoes in the air.  Be.

After a warm day, the rains have come to play percussions on the windows, the wind determinedly eroding words written in stone.  Tomorrow is a busy day, for I am helping bake kosher cookies in a synagogue's kitchen, destined for my new daughter-in-law's shower.  But look, already; it is the tomorrow, three minutes past midnight.  Time then, to waft into bed, to remember sitting earlier this day by a lake with a friend, speaking of paragraphs and beginnings.

Sleep well; we tell stories to share our lives, to bring people together through commonality, to teach what we have learned, to encourage and support one another; to amuse, to draw away from the work of living and give a moment of respite.  Look in your own cupboards, behind doors locked away in memory for you are there; the words of remembrance are waiting.  A story.  Tell me a story.

Once there was...

Wishes

Spring; the leek gathering took place in a woods full of the last trilliums and the first waxen jack-in-the pulpits, fallen tree trunks ages old were knotted in covers of lichens and moss; the farmer's market has started, with homegrown asparagus standing like bundled arrows and the young man who plays accordion on a folding chair.  Windows are pushed open, visiting spiders are escorted out.  People are glad, and come down to Canalside to breathe in the fresh air of the lake and see the new developments that are part of this city's resurgence.  Many bicycles, more than I've seen in years; the mayor is putting in bicycle lanes everywhere to encourage riding.

All of this--plus the sound of ice cream truck chimes out on the street, innocent flower heads guillotined off by seven year old fingers and brought triumphantly to my desk, and best, no more snow jackets--has sent my kids over the top.  They are exuberant, distracted, and trying to get last licks in on mortal enemies.  He looked at my paper so I punched him.  She said I was stupid so I punched her.  Stairs?  I need no stairs, watch me jump the last six.  I can fit in this locker, close the door, and make animal noises.

You hear odd barking sounds, stick your head out into the hallway, see no one, go back to the lesson and BLAHBLAHHHHH!!  WOOF WOOF WOOF!!!  FUCK YOOOOOUUUUU!!!!  Stick your head out into the hallway again, then call the office.  Once the kid realized he couldn't open the door from the inside, the eff yous transformed into second grade pleading and screaming for some assistance. What the heck goes on in their heads?

I gave my class the "Don't You Ever" look and continued with the inquiry on Dr. Martin Luther King's  "I Have a Dream" speech, and what would your dream be for our country?  Now, little kids have no idea where they are two blocks from here, so the idea of "country" isn't an easy concept especially if they haven't traveled.  Ask them what city they are in, and they will shout NOONITED STATES OF AMERICA!  Most don't know the street they live on due to moving or being shuttled around family members, but the word that works is "everybody".  What would you like for everybody?  And this is the part where they transform from all over the place to adorable.

Bicycles, video games, and toys ranked tops, peace which means no slugging your neighbor came in second, then came Keithan, who I had run into selling candy bars at the thrift shop the day before.  A six year old kid being sent around to sell candy by himself in a very large store; once his family saw me, they scooped him up and ran out of Dodge.  But his face lit up when it was his turn; "I want to take everyone to the beach."  Everyone.  He gets to play in the sand, swim, and be a child for a while;    when he produced that big grin, I knew there was happiness, a memory that may help carry him forward.

Another of my boys is battling a growing awareness of what his father wants him to be, a rough, tough fighter, and who he really is; a boy who loves beautiful princesses and playing with girls.  He tries to erase his feelings, and that's when trouble starts; it conflicts with his inner sense, and he slaps or hits the others, usually a girl.  This child just wants to live in a Disney movie, be the one in the blue gown whirling with a talking teapot.  His dream?  "I want everyone to see Santa.  Everyone gets a present." I melted, and now understand why he brings his mother's jewelry to school to give away.  That's a good wish, I said; it's very nice to wish someone to be happy.

Roger the Orange Cat is also going through his own desires of being King of the Wild Frontier and is slowly realizing that ain't happening in any of his nine lives.  He's been through hell; a severely broken hind leg, subsequent frostbite that took half of one ear while he was lying in a snowbank till found, and there are still unseen aches and pains healing inside.  Yet if I shake a finger at him, he sits up straight, puts his ears back, and squints with indignation at my intolerance of him dragging my socks about, climbing the cupboard to capture the plastic bag of catnip and tearing its living guts out, or trying to shove Kai out of her place.  I find objects moved, knocked over, or killed, like the plant he dragged out of its pot then barfed up on the rug.

For all his mischief and chest thumping, he's a love, an innocent, a sweetie who I suspect spent little time inside a home and therefore is catching up on learning.  While doing the dishes, I opened the oven door in order to store a frying pan; two seconds pass and there's an orange tail sticking out of the oven.  I have never had a cat jump in an oven.  I told him he would turn into gingerbread that I would use to build a jellybean-covered cottage in the woods if he didn't get his squirrely self out of there.  Roger thought it was a great fort that he would run his command from and said he wasn't leaving; I lifted him out, mindful of his crooked little leg.  I will find him a box to plot overthrow from.

Dreams come; some are realized, some fade, some become ongoing chapters of our stories or immense billboards with pink neon letters flashing, "What On Earth Were You Thinking?".  Don't worry, we all have a few of those, be glad for the movement they create; it foists decisions right in your face like a wagging finger which is a good thing.

Get thee to bed, then; turn out the day, sleep and wish.

Green Glass, Green Leaf

The illumination of green in the sun; the vibrance of new grass, buds on trees, leaves unfurling.  Spring has swept into the crevices of winter, and is flinging green shoots and stems from May’s pockets.  Another season of brief all-in-a-hustle has arrived; migrating birds have come and gone on to nesting sites, blue robin’s egg shells and the mottled brown of a cardinal’s lay empty on the ground; leeks are pushing their broad leaves up and up amid trillium, mandrake, and jack-in-the-pulpits, signaling gathering time. The brightest greens which are the flowers of the maple trees will soon fall, just as the white- rosey pink dappled petals heavy from the branches of apple and pear follow.

The thickness of a soda glass bottle is substantial, necessary to hold the carbon dioxide forced inside the liquid, until that is released by opening the cap; it is also needed to withstand the pressures of the bottling process, and have the ability to be reused.  You won’t see a square soda bottle, it couldn’t hold, too many weaker areas; a cylinder is much stronger.  When formed, the liquid glass rounds against the mold naturally, eliminating sharp changes in direction, providing additional inner strength to the vessel.  People have come to expect a heft of glass which gives the pleasure of weight in hand, of holding something sure; thick glass also retains the refrigerated chill longer.  Elevate a green bottle to the light and rays cast pullulations of lime-colored pools to the ground; the rim holds a flickering green genie inside; better for you than drinking out of plastic anyways.  The taste is clear in stable glass, the bottle is mercifully silent.

Today my son Brian and I went to an old shale quarry that is now owned by a geological society, just 18 minutes from where I live.  The previous owners had removed enough shale that the compressed layer, which was once a muddy bottom of an ocean 380 million years ago, was exposed.  In that saline bathwater uncountable forms of life swam or not, while pieces of land jigsawed together to form North America and the other continents, at the time mostly located in the southern hemisphere. Parts that formed the ocean floor were pushed up by tectonic pressures into land exposed to air, so the first fish had something to walk on.

But all the little things that lived at the bottom died there as well, so when the intense, Gargantuan forces heaved land masses upwards, the remains of ocean life were also lifted into the Devonian atmosphere under pounds of mud.  Some are not fossilized, but remain as shell; to hold a tiny, delicate cup that is 380 million years old is a bit of a shiver.  A happiness.  Some still catch the light in a yellowed translucence, others exhibit iridescence, or pyritization.  Some have become stone imbedded within stone, but each infinite detail is recorded in rock, leaving a calling card species by species.

We trotted with a rented bucket and two rock hammers, a chisel, safety goggles, and a mallet. One of the geologists at the site took us to the area where the brachiopod layer was exposed, and as after the winter melt, there were several nice specimens of  Atrypa just laying on the ground.  Digging into the grey, hardened muck of ancient oceans brought out Spiriferida and Strophomenida, odd adaptive animals that appear to be related to clams yet are not.  Nope, not clams.  The shell material is different, and they fed by sweeping bits of food into their mouths with tentacles, then disappeared about one hundred million years before the great dinosaur extinction, in a hiccup that is supposed to have killed 90% of all species.  We filled the bottom of a bucket with brachiopods, and mid the flat plain of the quarry small sprouts of new plants were pushing through the cracked mud.  Birds sang, families had brought children out to dig, the geologists manning the entry kept asking about Brian’s idea of fossil wedding favors.  The bride is okay with this?  Where did he find her?  News that someone is interested in the local fossils made them go home feeling like progress is being made.

We drove back along the green waters of Lake Erie, green for the sake of a limestone bed which extends into the Niagara River.  The particulates give the water a hue, the hardness clogs up shower heads; we get plenty of limestone in our drinking water.  Lowering sunlight reflected a million wavelets in the lake, as the treasures which existed about the same time as starlight left the furthest stars bounced softly in paper toweling.  What we see at night no longer exists in the same position, for that light left the visible stars hundreds of years ago, and reaching further with mechanical assistance, it could be millions, right when these little creatures were anchoring themselves with pedicles to a semi-saltwater floor.  It takes over a half hour for the sunlight to bounce from Jupiter to the Earth. Time.  Is there a Speed of Time?

In small areas of the fossil beds, shards of glass sparkled atop the clay; the site has trouble with local kids hanging out at night, drinking.  Clear, brown, blue, and green crescent shaped edges lay like polished gems, all worn down from winter erosion; come the warm summer nights, a fresh littering will appear. Pretty, but for the ground holding eons of prehistory, totally unnecessary.

Looking up, you may see the oxygen sixty miles up glowing green as the Aurora Borealis, and once I saw the green curtains hanging in the midnight sky, a dull crackling sound emitted as the lines slowly waved and undulated.  The show did not last long, eventually dissolving into green clouds, then phantoms; we don’t get to see them at this latitude, and I only remember seeing the red and blue ones when I was quite small.  My parents got me up out of bed to watch the flashes of light, the dulling pinks and reds reminded me of a minor sunset.  But my favorite are the green; what causes the movement, the form?  Someday I will find them, but for the present, a glass bottle catching the sun, a stem of new burdock rising in a field, the vibrant spring greens roiling from tree to grass to leaf, the dangerous currents of the river that travels north to the Falls now free of ice; they will have to do.

Green oh green, how glad we are to welcome you back to daily life, your plants oxygenating the air, the living things that cannot be without you.  Bees and butterflies, rat snakes and rabbits and us.  You clarify the evening air, and send stories of night over the sill, pulling our senses into a time of when.  Depths of eons, of fiery stars and creatures within my palm that lived 380 million years ago.  Good night, good night, sleep without counting.  Just be.