(no subject)
I wrote this around about Christmas time last year. Enjoy.
Shrimp Gumbo Theorem
This weekend, I will be visiting my grandparents for a late Christmas, tagged onto Nana’s birthday on the 29th and staying for a few days in the house they have lived in since they moved here from England in my dad’s early childhood. Every year, I find this trip not unpleasant but, still, in some ways uncomfortable, like sitting next to a polite drag queen on the subway who has on both a pleasant perfume and ghastly aftershave. But for seeing my grandparents and other members of their side of the family, I tolerate the old, wet smells and noises of the musty house and its musty denizens, the stewed and salty meals in front of the perpetually limping Weather Network, the creaky, dry-erosion feeling of the entire city, even the combined awkward energies of the ever mildy-surprised looking middle-aged uncle who still has his room upstairs (married to his computer, my mom jokes) and the weakly twinkling plastic-wrap dome of Mormonism over the house, felt with most strength in the basement where my grandparents have literally stored buckets of wheat and honey for Judgment Day. In this list, I realize I may sound a tad unsettled about all of these things, and I am - but I can manage trivial inconveniences like all of those: I have two little brothers, and I’ve had them for years.
The only thing about spending time at my grandparent’s house that truly bothers me is when, at a particular moment, the yellowed living room sucks up all of the accented smalltalk about one’s job and another’s school grades and shoots it into the walls to try and keep them stable for a few more hours, and we get out the cribbage board for the first of what will be many, many times over our stay. (The amount of cribbage played in my grandparents’ household in a year is likely equal to the number of people in the country who haven’t a clue what cribbage is.) But it is not the cribbage itself that bothers me. When Granddad manages to slide open the compartment in the back of the board, after he herds in the rolling pegs with his shaky, bony hands, we pick colors, and he always chooses the white pegs. “They’re the pure ones,” he always says, without fail, and this statement puts me on edge. I am fully aware that he doesn’t mean anything about people, simply symbolic colors, as one would have on a coat-of-arms, but it always turns a big flat stone in my head, makes me whine a little, inwardly. Granddad’s innocent expression - that and the Mormon energy fencing the house - always conjure up guilt in me about the slave trade in the Nineteenth Century, how indescribably inhumane the colonists were in dealing human lives, how even the people who would become Canadians partook in it. It is awful to think about it.
I am grateful this year of two things - two things that will make me feel better about what this horrible industry that treated people like livestock created. The first is the fact that I was born well over a hundred years after the legal abolishment of the trade. The second is shrimp gumbo.
I was given a minor job last summer: for a week, I stayed at a privately-owned campground populated by the families of the owners, helping in the kitchen for a few days, then being the sole chef on the site for the next few days while the staff cook found medical attention for a dislocated wrist. During one of those blessed afternoons on the lake, a warm and bright day, I sat in the kitchen with the lights off, reading by the window a cookbook that caught me in some way, spoke to a little column of unusual nostalgia in the middle of me. It was called Soul Food, and it was a collection of down-to-earth, hearty recipes amassed from deep-southern culture, Negro culture. During the time of the slave trade, the blacks were treated as little more than property and so did not have any money to buy food or any food to buy. Instead, they made do with the leftovers of their landlords. This food was prepared with such care and devotion - for food was scarce for them - that it became something better than simply leftover scraps. In the present day, people frequently choose to eat food made from these same leftover bits, even when given the option of gourmet. It came to me that slavery, though atrocious in nature, begat something beautiful: soul food - shrimp gumbo. This was what I made for dinner, with cornbread and apple cake. Everyone loved the meal, even though the cornbread was more like scrambled egg than anything and everything was an hour late. And when I at last stopped my racing back and forth through the kitchen wiping this and scrubbing that to have a bowl of my rather improvisational try at southern cooking (such is the nature of a gumbo), I found it to be quite delicious, and since then I’ve had a much greater interest in Cajun cooking.
That was the evening my theorem began to develop. I was watching marshmallows pivot in the microwave and slowly inhale until they grew to the size of baseballs when it occurred to me that absolutely everything that ever will happen and ever has happened, no matter how vile, no matter how tragic, no matter how gut-shreddingly unjust, will create or has created something beautiful, wholesome, true.
Such is balance. Such is my Shrimp Gumbo Theorem. I’ve now forgotten what I was griping about.
Shrimp Gumbo Theorem
This weekend, I will be visiting my grandparents for a late Christmas, tagged onto Nana’s birthday on the 29th and staying for a few days in the house they have lived in since they moved here from England in my dad’s early childhood. Every year, I find this trip not unpleasant but, still, in some ways uncomfortable, like sitting next to a polite drag queen on the subway who has on both a pleasant perfume and ghastly aftershave. But for seeing my grandparents and other members of their side of the family, I tolerate the old, wet smells and noises of the musty house and its musty denizens, the stewed and salty meals in front of the perpetually limping Weather Network, the creaky, dry-erosion feeling of the entire city, even the combined awkward energies of the ever mildy-surprised looking middle-aged uncle who still has his room upstairs (married to his computer, my mom jokes) and the weakly twinkling plastic-wrap dome of Mormonism over the house, felt with most strength in the basement where my grandparents have literally stored buckets of wheat and honey for Judgment Day. In this list, I realize I may sound a tad unsettled about all of these things, and I am - but I can manage trivial inconveniences like all of those: I have two little brothers, and I’ve had them for years.
The only thing about spending time at my grandparent’s house that truly bothers me is when, at a particular moment, the yellowed living room sucks up all of the accented smalltalk about one’s job and another’s school grades and shoots it into the walls to try and keep them stable for a few more hours, and we get out the cribbage board for the first of what will be many, many times over our stay. (The amount of cribbage played in my grandparents’ household in a year is likely equal to the number of people in the country who haven’t a clue what cribbage is.) But it is not the cribbage itself that bothers me. When Granddad manages to slide open the compartment in the back of the board, after he herds in the rolling pegs with his shaky, bony hands, we pick colors, and he always chooses the white pegs. “They’re the pure ones,” he always says, without fail, and this statement puts me on edge. I am fully aware that he doesn’t mean anything about people, simply symbolic colors, as one would have on a coat-of-arms, but it always turns a big flat stone in my head, makes me whine a little, inwardly. Granddad’s innocent expression - that and the Mormon energy fencing the house - always conjure up guilt in me about the slave trade in the Nineteenth Century, how indescribably inhumane the colonists were in dealing human lives, how even the people who would become Canadians partook in it. It is awful to think about it.
I am grateful this year of two things - two things that will make me feel better about what this horrible industry that treated people like livestock created. The first is the fact that I was born well over a hundred years after the legal abolishment of the trade. The second is shrimp gumbo.
I was given a minor job last summer: for a week, I stayed at a privately-owned campground populated by the families of the owners, helping in the kitchen for a few days, then being the sole chef on the site for the next few days while the staff cook found medical attention for a dislocated wrist. During one of those blessed afternoons on the lake, a warm and bright day, I sat in the kitchen with the lights off, reading by the window a cookbook that caught me in some way, spoke to a little column of unusual nostalgia in the middle of me. It was called Soul Food, and it was a collection of down-to-earth, hearty recipes amassed from deep-southern culture, Negro culture. During the time of the slave trade, the blacks were treated as little more than property and so did not have any money to buy food or any food to buy. Instead, they made do with the leftovers of their landlords. This food was prepared with such care and devotion - for food was scarce for them - that it became something better than simply leftover scraps. In the present day, people frequently choose to eat food made from these same leftover bits, even when given the option of gourmet. It came to me that slavery, though atrocious in nature, begat something beautiful: soul food - shrimp gumbo. This was what I made for dinner, with cornbread and apple cake. Everyone loved the meal, even though the cornbread was more like scrambled egg than anything and everything was an hour late. And when I at last stopped my racing back and forth through the kitchen wiping this and scrubbing that to have a bowl of my rather improvisational try at southern cooking (such is the nature of a gumbo), I found it to be quite delicious, and since then I’ve had a much greater interest in Cajun cooking.
That was the evening my theorem began to develop. I was watching marshmallows pivot in the microwave and slowly inhale until they grew to the size of baseballs when it occurred to me that absolutely everything that ever will happen and ever has happened, no matter how vile, no matter how tragic, no matter how gut-shreddingly unjust, will create or has created something beautiful, wholesome, true.
Such is balance. Such is my Shrimp Gumbo Theorem. I’ve now forgotten what I was griping about.