The smell is something that I notice less, now that I am old, but when I do, it brightens my day. I prefer a mix of basil, oregano, sage, and harissa, but to me those are winter flavors. Now, in the sweltering heat of the summer at the end of my life, I use lighter suggestions, turmeric and lemon, with explosions loud enough to pierce the blanket over my senses, Szechuan pepper and ginger and scotch bonnet.
There are leftovers now. There weren’t, back in fatter, cooler times. The prices are fixed, but the needed amounts dwindled along with the power of the budget. Nothing lasts past the week, and the plan rolls forward always.
It is the venue of the young and the stupid to forget. We all were young once, some longer than others, or younger, and some very recently. It is the job of the young to learn. It is the duty of the stupid to exit the sidewalk and allow the march of education.
In that vein, we take the small roast from Monday and boil it in the broth of Tuesday. The further evaporated and concentrated remains become the thickened sauce for Wednesday’s brassica selection. The remains of the cabbage variant is minced and joins a starch, often rice, to be Thursday’s meal, which is mixed with flour to be Friday’s bread. The stale bread, toasted, is Saturday and Sunday breakfast, ritually broiling, reforming, and consuming the sufficient evils now spread unto all the days.
And the song of my people rings out bold across the hills, and the dead lie deaf in the dirt. And the lone voice across the swampy moor rings like a clarion:
Down at the diner
Where the fools and the dregs
Sit shoulder to shoulder
To shoulder with eggs
Slinging greasy bacon
Where the wild roses grew
You can tell the damned of hist’ry
By the truths that they stew.
The national myth, like the folklore of its ancestral cookery or the gross weight of its smallest sin, is invented daily. Traditions are built on seconds. Aeons are made of fathomless piles of shattered particles of time too small to perceive and yet mounded into stacks.
And dinner was ready yesterday and will be ready tomorrow but is never ready today. In the moment, nothing is ready and nothing is true, until the eye steals its perspective from the universe and creates a false whole from a mountain of fictions that don’t amount to a hill of beans.
Unless I’m out of rice, and then beans are on Thursday.
Audio version by Ruth Gibbs
Music by the Denton Glee and Perloo Chorus:
Ruth Gibbs, Izzy Taylor, and Ben Gibbs