"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

elegy for a tomatillo ... and Steve Jobs

We planned to go for a walk at twilight tonight, David and I, but when we stepped outside the dusk was chillier than we'd anticipated. "I wonder if I should go check the forecast," he said. "Yeah, you should," I said, "because if it's going to get below freezing we probably need to do some harvesting."

He went back inside, and came out again through the French doors, leading to the garden, where I'd already gone. "Supposed to go down to 28 degrees tonight," he reported. "Yikes," I said, and we both returned to the kitchen to grab several large bowls and the yellow colander. Then back out.


David worked on the beans, which have been producing generously all season long, the pole beans, climbing their rustic tee-pees, tendril by tendril, at the edge of the garden, adding what to my eye is such charm, the sunflowers behind them. He picked my favorites, the exuberantly abundant densely podded Spanish musicas. Then he picked the others: the flatter white and scarlet runner beans that are so good when cooked slowly, the rattlesnake beans, with their green purple-mottled pods, encasing white beans also mottled purple. Then he crouched to work on the bush beans: the limas, the Kentucky wonders, the yellow waxes, the black valentines (green pods, shiny black beans inside), and the royal burgundies (wondrously purple-podded, and though the pods turn green a few moments after they're submerged in boiling water, the water, after their cooking, turns turquoise, which keeps the wonder going, as far as I'm concerned).

I love beans, as you can tell. In fact my book about them, Bean by Bean, will be out early next year.

But. Given the quantities David was picking, I would clearly be canning, pickling, and freezing in the near future. (Below, last year's Green Tomato Mincemeat, which I'm about to make again, from my own Passionate Vegetarian)


While he worked on the beans, I turned my attention to the tomatillos.

I was thrilled, three years ago, to find tomatillo starts at the farmer's market. I love tomatillos (for those of you who don't know them, they're in the tomato family, usually bright green --- though there are purple varieties --- and protected by an elegant papery husk; and they are the stuff of salsa verde). I think I bought six or seven plants that first year, with little idea of how enthusiastically and messily they would grow and produce.

At harvest that year, after canning a dozen half-gallon jars of salsa verde and the same again of just plain tomatillo puree, for our household of two --- yeah, we have a lot of guests, true, but still --- I called it quits. When I added the pulled-up plants to the compost pile that year, I am embarrassed to confess I did so, consciously, knowing I was still leaving plenty of perfectly good tomatillos on the vine: me, to whom wasting food is morally repugnant. I begged the pardon of the plants, and every hungry person in the world, and the generous universe itself, for forgiveness as I discarded them. But I did discard them.

So, last year, I planted cautiously: just two tomatillo plants. They bore, but not with nearly the fervor of their kin the year before. They were far fewer fruits per plant, and, strangely, in quite a few cases the husk would grow full-size, but the tomatillo within it would be only the size of a cherry tomato. I ended up canning just 1 half-gallon and a quart or two... which I kept aside for what is now an annual tradition at the Labor Day Fearless Writing: the Whole Enchilada. Because one dinner at that event, of course, must be enchiladas, which I sauce in long beautiful stripes of red tomato salsa and green salsa verde, and I couldn't know how well the following summer's crop would bear.


This year I hedged my bets. I put in just three tomatillo plants, gave them a corner of the garden in which they could flop uninhibitedly to their heart's content, and basically left them alone, harvesting just a few to freshen up and round out the last year's canned ones, for the Whole Enchilada dinner in early September, which is too early to justify wholesale harvest.

Otherwise, I left them alone. That is, until tonight.

As David did the beans, I pulled tomatillo after tomatillo from the spreading, generous stems, many stems per plant. They bore, this year, as abundantly as they had that first year. I'd break off a stem, and pick the tomatillos from it. I'd drop the husk-wrapped fruits into the 2 1/2 gallon stainless steel bowl, then toss the stem to the side of the garden to pick up later during the serious fall garden clean-up, which we'll do in a few days, at the same time we plant the garlic.

(Plant garlic in fall; harvest the next summer... as I did, one hot, hot day a few months back, on my way up from a dip in our pond, as I passed through the garden. Silly picture, but so true to that moment.)

I brought one full bowl of tomatillos in from the cool darkening night to the warm, bright kitchen. I emptied it carefully onto the kitchen counter, returned to the garden, and began to fill the bowl a second time. There was still some light, the sky still recognizably blue, but it was growing darker, more chill by the minute. A sudden half-moon rose in what's east this time of year (here in this northern latitude, the directions change so radically, disorientingly, with each season). Very large, very bright, the moon was more cooly silver than golden, and a few wisps of haziness veiled it. Three or four small puffy pink clouds, still colored by the departing sun, hovered near the moon, seeming like slightly anxious handmaidens: "Is there anything you need?" "Is everything all right?"

Harvesting under this illumination, I suddenly thought of the Edna St.Vincent Millay poem my mother, now 96, used to quote when I was a child, the line "she weeds her lazy lettuce by the light of the moon" sounding in my inner ear as if she had just spoken it in her young mother's voice, getting across, somehow, how succulent those words were to her. My mother, who has forgotten every poem she ever knew, but who, paradoxically, seems to me happier moment to moment than she ever was when in her so-called right mind.

I pulled another large stem from the tomatillo plant I was working on, and, as I pulled the fuits off of it, completely unexpectedly, my heart gave a sudden contraction of grief. Because there, arching out from it, was another stem, covered with the robust fleshy leaves... but also, blossoms. Small bell-shaped bright orange blossoms, star-like in the night, dotting that whole stem... maybe fifteen of them.

"Awww," I called out to David. "I just found a whole lot of blossoms here. They didn't get to be tomatillos!"

And then, surprising myself, I added, "I wonder if it was like that for Steve Jobs." 

"What?" asked David, in that startled, did-I-miss-something tone, which suggests if-I-didn't-miss-something-you-may-be-insane.

"I wonder if he felt like he still had all these blossoms that weren't going to have a chance to bear fruit."

As I continued picking, that thorn still in my heart, I thought about Steve Jobs, the little I know about him.

I'm still a PC user and I don't own an i-anything, though I can't count how many people I know who've had an Apple moment where the heavens opened up and everything stood revealed, and I have no doubt that one of these years I will have an i-something, and maybe my own Apple moment.

But I do have a mouse. And I do have a laptop. And I do know how much he revolutionized the world. And how much people who knew him, along with the countless many who didn't, revere not just his work, but him.

And then, there are all the things he said that are circulating now: About how he'd "wanted to leave a ding in the universe." And "... the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on."

But his rolled on only to 56.

And from here, standing at the cusp of 58 and 59, blessed with work I love doing, I know that if I received a terminal diagnosis tomorrow, I would feel like one of the plants I was pulling tomatillos from: partially able to be harvested from, partially fulfilled, but with so many, many unpotentialized blossoms.

And, I guess inevitably, I wondered about Ned, about the seconds when his bicycle flew through the air before landing in and breaking the windshield of the oncoming vehicle --- if he had a chance to know, wonder, regret all the things he was not going to have a chance to do. (Ned, right, as a 16-year-old, long before I knew him, throwing wheel pottery in high school. When we were affianced and went to meet his parents, he opened a door in their attic and showed me boxes of his pottery. "My dowry!" he said proudly. I still eat from his soup bowls).

I talked to the young man whose pick-up it was --- this was early days, just a week or two after Ned's death; not six months later, when he decided to sue "the estate of Ned Shank" for "pain and suffering due to PTSD" --- on the phone. I told him I didn't hold him responsible; that from what I could tell, from the accident report, it was an act of God, and the laws of phyics.

Then I asked him a question I maybe shouldn't have asked. But I wanted to know, I wanted some clue: how did he feel? Did he know? How much?  "Did you see his face, before the moment of impact?"

"Yes, m'am, I did. "

"And... did you get a sense of ... what was his expression?"

"It was like, 'Oh... crap.'"

But balanced against that is the story of the lovely woman named (and how poignantly this struck me)  Grace. Grace was 2/3 small-town acquaintaince/ colleague, 1/3 friend, and she was in the car behind the pick-up which struck Ned. She got out, and sat with Ned in that two-lane road, as traffic backed up on both sides, until the EMTs got there.

She told me that when she first sat with him, bloodied and broken but still alive, she said, "Ned, this is Grace." I always wonder how he heard that; how, in that state, he interpreted the word 'grace'. And afterwards, from the first time Grace described the scene to me (very late that same night, after he'd died) to her words at his memorial, to the last time we spoke, identically: she talked about the feeling of peace that descended over the two of them.

And that, when she told him I had been notified, he repeated my name.

Ned's first children's book, The Sanyasin's First Day, had been published just six months before his death.  One of the first condolence calls was from his editor, Judith. Judith is a person whose emotional affect is not so much flat as consistently placid, unflappable. For the first time, in the many years I had known her, I heard her express unbridled emotion. "He would have written so many more books!" she said between the sobs, gusts of feeling shaking her. "I just know he would've!"

And he would've painted and drawn countless more pictures. Curled up with me so many more times. Had so many orgasms, and contributed to mine. Closed his eyes in pleasure as he let the first bite of any dessert he particularly liked dissolve slowly in his mouth. Laughed so hard that his whole face scrunched up and all you could see of his huge eyes with their absurdly long eyelashes was the tiny edge of the lashes. Made, on days when he woke up, staggered down to the bathroom, first beheld himself in the mirror and saw his hair crunched from either side into a tall, odd thatch, a "Woo-hoo-HOO" sound, which we referred to as the call of the Great Crested Droon, and which he would make while standing on one leg, indeed, looking oddly like a very peculiar, leggy shore bird.

He would've done so much: in and of himself, but also for and with others.

But, like the tomatillo blossoms, now and forever, he would not.

Ned was 44. An early, killing frost.

Steve Jobs, 56.
                                                                    xxx

One set of my present-day neighbors, Beth Kaplan and Jim Jordan, who --- with their daughter Stella --- live right down the hill from us here in Vermont, work for Antioch University of New England. Both Beth and Jim are in the Department of Environmental Studies.

Beth runs their graduate center in ecology and primate research, in Nyungwe National Park, Rwanda. She comes and goes from that country several times a year. At any given time, a couple of Rwandan graduate students live in Beth and Jim's downstairs.

Last Thanksgiving, we had dessert with Beth, Jim, their daughter Stella, William and Yves, the students staying with them, and a host of their other friends, in the educational, environmental, local and international communities in which they move. At one point, Yves and William and David and I were talking. They were astonished to learn that David was 71 (true, he looks young for his age). They were also astonished to learn I was 57 (true, I also look young for my age).

But their astonishment had little to do with looks.

"How old people live in your country!" exclaimed Yves. "In my country, 45 is old."

Perhaps a blossom isn't an immature fruit, but a blossom, perfect, orange, bell-like (if it is that of a tomatillo). Perhaps it is complete, completed, in itself.

Perhaps not.

Perhaps we write stories, and for that matter, blog posts, because there is no way we can ever answer questions definitively, in a world where loss and beauty and incomprehensibility all exist, side by side. Our narratives attempt to give shape and form to something so much larger than form itself, something that began long before we were here and is ever hurtling towards an outcome that will be forever unknowable to us.

Our narratives, by contrast, have a beginning, middle, and end. A story is, or can be, shapely.

It is not as messy as a tomatillo plant, as disorienting as a moon that rises in one side of the sky in October and in a wholly different place in June. It can have an equality and balance and sense a Rwandan student who witnessed the murder of his older sister (who had just, William once told me, bought him a soda, before the militia came) can never have when he considers ... well, life, or America and Africa, or me, or you, or Steve Jobs, or books about beans, or enough wealth that you could ever, under any circumstances, knowingly discard any food.

Yet, a story can include all these things.

Tomatillos: I have planted them, harvested them, cooked them, and even wasted a few.

But maybe not the latter. Tonight, the night of this fall's first frost, however imperfectly, I've written about those tomatillos, including the discarded ones, and the insights and longings they managed to evoke for me. This being so, nothing, even the tomatillo plants thrown, still fruiting, in the compost, is wasted. Nothing, when it can take you inward through writing, at all.

 

blue-ribbon silliness

I'm still going through business cards gathered at April's International Association of Culinary Professionals conference, catching up with what I scribbled on the back of each, reminders of promises made (probably foolishly, but with the best of intentions). If you look at the May 1 post, you'll see that April was a whole month of bebopping above and beyond IACP...which means, a whole lot of cards / promises-to-keep, and the word "Please excuse my taking so long to get back to you" written, in various ways, many times.

One of the emails I finally did tonight was to a woman who arranges judging and special promotions for state fairs around the country. She had wanted to discuss my possible involvement or services (cornbread judge? spokesperson?  I've done/been both. The spokespersonship was for the California Almond Board, back in 1992. More than a few friends saw fit to remind me, "Your first product endorsement is ... a nut!?" One, the herbalist Jim Long, even gave me a homemade certificate to the effect that, appearances to the contrary, "Crescent Dragonwagon A.I.N.T. N.U.T.S."  Jim, by the way, does a weekly blog, Jim Long's Garden Talk. Few are more qualified to so do, for many reasons, including the fact that he's been "gardening since age 3, " as he says, and there's an adorable photo on his blog to prove it).

Sorry. I never met a digression I didn't like.

Anyway, midway through following up with the state fair lady, I suddenly remembered something. One of those memories which flash up, fleshy, funny, full-blown, almost as amusing in the reliving as it was actually living it. 

Back in my former life, I lived in Arkansas. I was an innkeeper, I was married to Ned (now deceased, 7 1/2 years) and I was and did, oh, many other things. It all seems, at times, almost dreamlike to me.

But not entirely dreamlike, mostly thanks to friends, and , strangely, former inn guests. When I was on the recent tour for The Cornbread Gospels, at virtually every stop someone would come up to me and say, "You may not remember me, but my husband and I stayed at Dairy Hollow House with you many, many times, and we always just loved it." And I get emails from former guests periodically: "Brett, the son we conceived at Dairy Hollow House, just turned 21. We live in Montana now, but just had to write you. When we looked for you on the Internet, we discovered that Dairy Hollow House had closed, and were shocked to learn that Ned had lost his life. Even though we haven't seen you for more than 15 years and he passed away years ago, we were so saddened, and send our deepest condolences. Some of the best moments of our lives took place at Dairy Hollow, with you two." Such communications amaze and touch me, because, as I say, otherwise that past is so wholly vanished except in memory. When I hear someone's Dairy Hollow House story, as I listen something like the following goes on my own internal narrative: "See? You weren't making it up, it really was as good as you remember!" Above top, at a December 2007 book-signing, Barnes and Noble, Tulsa, Oklahoma, the audience was full of former DHH guests, among them Norma Banks (light blue blazer) with her husband, Dick. They stayed with us many times. Dick brought me a ziplock of hand-shelled and picked pecans --- shelled that day, so ultra-fresh --- and yes, there were some tears as we hugged and exchanged necessarily brief catch-ups. In the second photo, from the same event, I'm holding up a copy of the original, hard-cover Dairy Hollow House Cookbook, published in 1986: a former guest bought it, an "I was there" souvenir. You can buy it online, in hardcover, used, for fairly big bucks, or in paperback, for $14.95 + S & H, through link above. Pictures were taking by David Koff, the filmmaker who is very much a part of my present-day life.

But, back to blue ribbon silliness.

Well, in my innkeeper days I always meant to enter some of my jams and jellies in the Carroll County Fair. But somehow every year I would get too busy. Getting over to Berryville would just slip past me. Bizarrely, Berryville is one of two county seats in Carroll County --- the other is Eureka Springs --- but Berryville is the one with the fairground.

Finally, one year --- if I had to guess I'd say '89, '90? ---  I remembered at the appropriate time. Darling Hattie Mae, who worked for us then, was going over to Berryville, to Wal-Mart, and offered to drop the jams off at the fair and do the entry forms on my behalf.

Now, in my view, Hattie Mae, a hilariously funny and irreverent woman with quite a few years on me, is an angel of tolerance, intelligence, and organization, disguised in a Southern Baptist polyester package. She was one of the great gifts of my time in Arkansas (she moved there from Jackson, Mississippi). Hattie Mae showed me indelibly the utter folly of typecasting people by appearance and most other common markers. She was and is one of my favorite people. I visited her in Tennessee last fall when I was there on book-tour. We spent a drizzly afternoon walking around the Cheekwood Gardens in Nashville on a chilly, overcast day, sitting on various benches and walking through, touching, and examining various large installation sculptures, mostly just talking. But you know what? Despite the chill, we were warm.  She and David got to meet each other, too. It's always a relief when people you love, people from different phases of your life, turn out to like each other, and they did.  Two pictures from that lovely gray afternoon: Hattie Mae and me, above, and one of one of Cheekwood's more formal areas, a reflecting pool at a somber time of year. Both taken by David.

Anyway, back in the blue ribbon year, Hattie Mae got the jams and jellies entered, and then the weekend rolled around and the fair started in earnest. I hadn't still had a chance to get over there yet and see how my jams had done, but Hattie Mae was in Berryville again and checked.

"You better get over there," she told me.

"Why?" I said, "Did I win a ribbon?" 

She said, "I don't want to give away the surprise, you just get over there."

I was in the kitchen of the restaurant when she told me this, as I remember. I looked up at her, a neat gray-haired lady, in her trademark polyester. We were on opposite sides of the stainless steel serving counter, a restaurant-pan of 24 roast cornish game hens (I remember because 24 hens was what those pans held) between us. Their drumsticks were neatly tied (Ned once referred to them as a chorus line of "can't-can't girls"), and they were attractively glazed with one of those same jams Hattie had entered on my behalf. It was a typically insane Saturday night. I'm sure I was dripping with sweat and my chef's jacket no doubt had smears of chocolate and plum and blood (yes, though I'm a vegetarian, I cooked meat for many years) and other culinary detritus on it.

We looked at each other over the hens. We twinkled, because that's what Hattie Mae and I always did, and do.

"Come on, Hattie, what if I don't make it over there? Just tell me. Please? "   

"All right," she said,  making her mouth pretend-stern. "But you really do need to go for yourself." She paused. "Crescent, every one of your jams won a blue ribbon! Every one!"

Oh BOY I was one and surprised happy girl that night! And Sunday morning, after we got breakfasts out to the inn guests, Ned and I finally found time to go off to Berryville and check it out for ourselves.

Now, unbeknownst to me, there was some ridiculous county-wide political snafu concerning the new fairground and where it was going to be built. I don't remember the particulars, if I ever knew them. But, the Carroll County Fair, that particular year, was not being held at the old fairgrounds. And the new fairgrounds had not yet been constructed.

So, that year's Carroll County  Fair was held way out on someone's farm, out in a pasture.

As Ned and I drove to Berryville, then north, then further north, almost to the Missouri border, then took a left on a dirt road that turned into a cow path and finally slowly bumped our way across cattle-guards and through little dried-up wet-weather washes, I grew more and more dubious. But Hattie Mae had given us the directions. And finally, sure enough, the tents of the temporary fair ground, and the ferris wheel and other midway rides, came into view.

There weren't a whole whole lot of people there.  We found our way to the home ec tent, and sure enough, there were my jams, each with a blue ribbon around its neck. I ought to have been pleased as punch, and I was. Sort of. But... yet... presumably because of the mix-up with the fairgrounds ... not only weren't there a whole whole lot of people there, there weren't all that many entries.

Like, there were maybe only 3 or 4 other entries for each of the kinds of jam I had made and won a blue ribbon for.

As Ned and I walked away from the tent and out into the pasture I said to him, "You know, there being so few entries kinda takes some of the thrill out of winning."

"Well," said Ned thoughtfully, in a helpful tone, "You could say you came in first in a very large field."

(I probably don't need to add, but will anyway, that smart-ass remarks like this are part of what made me love Ned so much and so long, and make me love him still.)

CODA # 1 to the above:

I was talking with an old friend tonight, Michael Avenoso, a fellow part Yankee-part Arkansawyer who is now to all intents and purposes house-bound with advanced Lyme Disease, with which he lives in courage, pissed-off-ness, and wisdom... in short, grace. As well as with an extremely wonderful wife, my friend Jae, a brilliant artist in several media (fabric, acrylic, watercolor) who didn't fully 'own' her gift until later in life, an ardent gardener, an active Unitarian, a terrific cook,  home canner, organizer and... Anyway, even were he not on the long arduous road of illness, Michael has reached the stage in life where he and Jae are getting rid of and selling lots of stuff: a woodstove,  he told me, and twenty acres of woods he used to ramble when he was younger and healthier, and a lot more, things both large and small. We talked about all that some.

Michael said at first it was hard getting rid of stuff and letting go. 

"But then I realized, " he told me, "that there was the stuff, and then there were my stories about the stuff. And that I could give away or sell the stuff, but still keep the stories. The stories were mine whether or not I kept the stuff. That was a big revelation to me."

Perhaps it is correct to say not just that nothing is wasted on the writer, but nothing is wasted on the person who takes note of, and keeps, his or her stories and life-narrative. That these stories, not the  artifacts, are what contain the value. Moreover, as you tell yourself stories about your life and what it means, the stories change, unlike artifacts, because they are alive and dynamic. As you grow you develop new perspectives on what happened and the place it holds in making us who we are now. The stories, not the stuff, contain the value. It's not quite what Jesus meant (as far as I, or any of us, can presume to know what Jesus meant) when he said, "Lay not up your treasures where moth and rust doth corrupt." But it's related. Stuff is just stuff, matter.

(Although: a woodstove? A woodstove's value is clear, not metaphorical, or symbolic, or show-offy: it keeps you warm. Can't get yourself toasty sitting around a narrative, no matter how good, and that's a fact. Though, I guess in a sense you can. Maybe the best for warmth would be a stoked-up woodstove, sitting around it with friends, everyone telling their stories, everyone listening.)

I held the Mother of All Yard Sales when I left Arkansas, in particular the small town in Arkansas I'd lived in for so long (how small was it? 1200 people, none of whom agreed with each other on anything for more than a few minutes at a time). My friend KJ graciously let me hold it in a room at her restaurant, Caribe  (pictured: a corner of gorgeous Caribe, now sadly --- but not sadly for KJ, she's liberated! --- no more; this picture is from when I was there on book tour, in December 2007, and the restaurant was still extant, and David was wholly enchanted with its colors and art work and playfulness). The Mother of All Yard Sales was creepy in a way, like coming to the estate sale of your goods, except you were still alive. I had been part of that town for 33 years and somehow, that day it became evident to me, mostly through what other people said and the feeding frenzy over the possessions I was selling (some of which, I must admit, were pretty cool), that my leaving was  viewed by many as "the end of an era."  Tears were shed: some by me, some by others; some, in both cases, were part of grieving Ned's loss and the changes it had necessitated. Those members of the community who were presumably happy to see me go, and there were a few, stayed away.

How much did I sell at the Mother of All Yard Sales? $6000 worth of stuff in one day.  (Much needed by me at that point, I'll add). And I miss only a few of the things I released: a couple of teapots, a square of patchwork I used to keep on my bureau.

But here's a fact. I did save those blue ribbons. They hang in the closet in what's now my writing room (which was my bedroom when I was a teenager visiting Aunt Dot here; I once got in BIG trouble with my aunt for writing, in this very same closet, in large letters,  in green paint, "The Beatles 4-Ever!" when I was about 14; long since painted over.)  Some of the ribbons have faded to purple, a few maintain their original blue. They have a pinked bottom edge, a folded-over triangular top in which the hang-tag is inserted in a little brass eye. Next comes a round gold something-or-other with visuals that are utterly illegible, but claims itself, in gold, as  "THE SEAL OF THE STATE OF ARKANSAS." It's followed, all in caps, traveling down the ribbon, with these words:

CARROLL
COUNTY
FAIR AND
LIVESTOCK
SHOW
_______
BERRYVILLE
ARKANSAS

Where I once came in first in a very large field.

CODA # TWO to the above:

And here, in Vermont, today, I planted an asparagus bed, in my own very large field, during a light intermittent rain.

I thought about investment, time, money, friendship, of course asparagus... but all that's material for another post.