Why Doesn’t It Taste Good?                   

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about pie, lately. Not so unusual after the holidays when we seem to be wearing every extra piece we ate. But pie isn’t only for celebrations. It’s an everyday event in our community. Dining reputations are made on it. Supermarkets sell it by the stack. Some of us buy frozen pie crust and make our own pies. And a few people--I know they’re still around--make theirs from scratch. That is, make the pie crust themselves, too. How radical is that?

I  think pie crust is an excellent example of what has happened to American food.

What does it take to make a crust? Flour, water, salt and fat. Simple. But not easy, hence the appeal of “shortening.” Shortening comes in a tin and is the color of nursery school paste. It makes a sturdy crust that can be crimped attractively and mass produced, if desired. But it has no taste. Add to it the current habit of omitting salt from the crust and you have what I think of as throw-back pie. Back to the middle ages, when crust was a “coffin” intended to keep its contents together long enough to serve. Gentry got the filling (usually meat and gravy) and the servants ate the coffin crust. But I’ll bet that tasted better than most crusts today because the fat, over there in England, was likely to be lard.

The best pie crust I ever ate was, actually, in England. Fresh gooseberries baked without sweetening in a light and flavorful crust. You passed the sugar in a caster, for dusting across the top—before you dolloped on the heavy cream. The crust brought all those flavors together and elevated them because it was made with lard. And the right amount of salt.

Have you had a pie, lately, where the crust enhanced the flavor of the pie? I haven’t.

Butter makes a delicious crust, too, although not as sturdy as shortening, of course, so you don’t often see it in a store. A butter crust, however, will surprise anyone who is accustomed to shortening only, or to shortening and the list of preservatives that you find in the supermarket.

Convenience is a large part of the reason for diminished flavor. And it’s not just pie crust, is it?

Have you noticed in the supermarket how much of the produce is wrapped in plastic? Over the holidays, I even bought some haricot verts, the skinny green beans that when fresh (and properly cooked, not raw) will burst with green bean flavor. These came from Guatemala. They looked beautiful inside their plastic wrapping, all grouped in the same direction, ready for the pot. And they were terrible. They had maintained their fresh appearance, that appealing green, but lost every trace of flavor.

Why buy something shipped “fresh” from abroad, you will ask. And you’re right. Quality inevitably deteriorates. A better question, though, may be: why stock it? At Thanksgiving several years ago the same supermarket had bins of young green beans that were outstanding. Unprocessed. Truly fresh and they tasted that way. I’d been hoping to find those this year, but maybe bad weather ruined the crop.

The question of flavor in food brings me to the annual New Year’s diet. Why do I overeat when the food is nothing special?

Can it be that I’m remembering how the dish is supposed to taste? And I keep eating in the hope of finding that satisfaction in the next bite?

Or, more generally, can it be that deeply satisfying food has become more difficult to find? What I’m talking about is a meal when what we eat feels good throughout our being. When it satisfies a hunger of the body for real nutrition combined with flavor. (A little like that “deep down body thirst” we hear about in commercials.)

Instead, we seem to be training our palates, if not our bodies, to desire processed fakery like chips embedded with flavor enhancers.

Here’s a choice we’re asked to make all too often: On one hand, a packaged snack that explodes with carefully tested lab-created flavors developed to make us want more; on the other, a plate of tasteless vegetables from far away whose colors have been preserved to withstand shipping.

I know which one I’d choose, doggone it.

Visiting the Vet

If you don’t like dogs, go read something else. I’m breaking the rules here.

You’re not supposed to write about your dog. It’s amateurish. Yup.

But I’m not writing about how darling she is, or how adorable her predecessors undoubtedly were. Only Marley gets to be a bad dog in retrospect, and we all loved him, right?

I’m writing about her vet. Their vets.

We’ve had four Labrador retrievers over the years and one Labration. All have enjoyed intimate associations with veterinary medicine.

We are responsible pet owners. We follow the requirements on pets as carefully as we tend to our vehicles. They get their vaccinations, their spaying, neutering, nail clips, that kind of thing.

Over the lifetimes of five big dogs, however, the vet experience has changed.

Take smell, for example.

The vets of the past worked in an olfactory soup, day-old cooked liver competing with a warm cornflake smell. No doubt, urine was a part of this.

The new, up-to-date vet has an office that impresses the visitor with its cleanliness. Bright and cheery, staffed with equally bright and cheery people behind the latest in computer equipment. If there’s a smell it’s the pleasant one of high quality dry dog food, for sale as required.

In the redolent past, our first Lab’s vet greeted her in person and gave her the necessary shots. We shook hands, paid the fee, and that was that.

Now we have levels to pass through.

One delightful person checks us in. Another takes us to a pristine cubicle. We wait.

A woman enters and takes vital signs, hears the reason for the visit and so on. This person is not the vet.

She departs and, again, we wait.

A new person enters, and all the explanations are repeated. I’m not sure she’s the vet until her assistant comes through the door. Together they take my dog into the back where they do whatever is necessary.

I wait.

If we are lucky, the vet returns with the dog to discuss treatments in the latest medical language.

This is a significant change.

Old style vets spoke common, everyday English. Now doctors enjoy displaying the therapeutic Latin they have acquired, no doubt at considerable expense. I understand a lot of it, but does everyone?

If we are unlucky, she recommends testing.

Your dog can now be tested in every way available to you, without the assistance or obstacle of Obamacare, Medicare or just plain insurance. Unless you’ve bought health coverage for your pet, a monthly expense we’ve resisted, so far. The upward effect of insurance on the cost of human medical care is bad enough.

The fact that these tests exist seems to encourage their use.

An old style vet might take a wait-and-see approach. Or just apply the art of diagnosis he or she has developed over years of experience. The new style vet, freshly burnished by A&M or its equivalent, morphs into a duplicate of your very own human internist, offering the certainty of ultrasound and CT scanning. Or MRI.

It seems almost un-American not to pay joyfully for whatever the vet suggests is necessary to the health of the dog you love so much.

Doesn't it?                                                                                                                                                                    

Small is not Trivial

For me, country living provides an alternative to the manufactured stresses of daily life--the global disasters that leap to the surface of all our screens at the tap or slide of a finger. Or push of a button. Something new to fear or deplore every few minutes.

Even fun comes with its jolt of adrenaline. Pop concerts ramp up the bass, fire off lasers and smoke bombs. Apocalyptic movies compete with each other in the race to scare us silly. Visiting Houston, we see the immediate daily result in the rage that simmers on traffic-snarled streets.

People are not meant to live in conditions of sustained alert. When constantly elevated, the major stress hormone, cortisol, harms every process of the human body.

In the country, though, I can tune it all out.

I can measure a day by the passage of the sun across my yard.

Outside the window where I write, I see close-up the bark of a tree, and a nuthatch inching down, headfirst. I see the russet leaves of the loropetalum bush I should have pruned last spring. An atole steals across the window sill; a wasp bumps the pane, wanting cooler air. The slope of sun-cast shadows on the grass tells me it’s fall. Abundant life--and occasional death--are never far away. 

They require no reporter, no headline. No artificially induced fear.

In the country, I find pleasure in small things: The seed head of that old farmer’s bane, Johnson grass, beautifully fringed in the spotlight of an autumn afternoon; the loud silence of a Sunday morning torn by a hawk’s cry; the six white petals on an unknown flower sprouting leafless in the center of our gravel driveway.

Walking the dog, I’m surprised by the rustle of leaves nearby, then a sudden whoosh…whoosh and the hawk’s big dark shadow passes close overhead. In the woods a distance away, a commotion of fussing birds expresses palpable distress. Is it a snake that threatens them, or perhaps that hawk, again? These small occurrences are scarcely noticeable in the middle of our busy routines unless we look. But not one of them is trivial.

So I think of it like this.

I can look outward from myself, at the uncontrollable world, at unimaginable space where even geologic time loses all meaning. I can live from shock to shock on the screen of my computer, smartphone, television and tablet.

Or I can turn away from the anxiety that creates and look down at the ground I'm standing on. And allow myself to resonate in harmony with the ordinary universe I'm part of.

(Under a different title, this column appeared today in the Fayette County Record.)

Goodbye to a Voice

John Graves became an icon for Texas writers on account of one book, Goodbye to a River, which addressed what is eternal about Texas, and ever threatened. Our current dialogues, economic and political, fasten upon the superficial, and perhaps that is no surprise for a species that dwells in the tiny strip of earth and atmosphere that is habitable. We dwell there, still, despite our yearning to punch holes both ways, up and down, and we would do well to remember it.

Graves knew that from the beginning. It’s one reason his book has endured, still in print as a hardback from Knopf (Random House) after more than fifty years.

I celebrate this reality, but the aspect of Graves’s work that has stayed with me is his voice, his presence on the page. I read a blogger today who called that sonorous, supple voice “antiquated.” That River book, he said, might not be published today.

What a reductive comment--reductive, not of the book, but of the human spirit that animates publishing. Of our spirit as readers.

Great writing unrolls across the page according to a rhythm that resounds in a place far older and deeper than the thin layer of dopamine receptors activated by one’s most recent Twitter fix. Great writing allows time for the meaning of the words to strike the heart. It allows time for thought that’s contemplative, not reactive--the type of thought that forms character.

John’s writing does this. It also confirms that you are the kind of person capable of both thought and character. If writing can have gravitas, John’s does, as he did in person along with a leonine grace. My husband says that everyone wanted to be John’s friend, and moreover, known to be his friend. Being his friend felt like an accolade, a confirmation of some profound quality in one’s own self. 

That opportunity is now gone, but his voice rolls on. His voice is the river.

Journaling

The great Paris Review interview series instructs writers by example to keep a journal. Dutifully, I attempt to comply. Again and again, I strive for the daily entry, the recapitulation, the musing, all of it. Every time, the dailyness defeats me.

I do write every day, but I have never managed to put it in journal form for an extended period. No doubt this contributes to the sporadic frequency of posts to this blog. (And we all know what that means: few followers.)

Yet I have kept trying out of the belief that keeping a journal is central to the writing process.

During the writing of ABSENT, I began to find myself wondering what might have happened to Camille’s twin, swallowed up by the Holocaust, at that point. I have read numerous books on the concentration camps of Germany and Eastern Europe. I knew I couldn’t live inside one of these places for the three or four years it takes to write a novel. I would drown.

The story, however, kept pulling me toward itself. Scraps of narrative, dialogue, interior monologue kept arriving and I wrote them down. I picked one of these little black, book-size notebooks, the kind with a rubber band that can be used to hold your place. I carried it everywhere, scribbling bits into it when they came to me. No dates, no dailyness. If I thought of something and the notebook was temporarily unavailable, I wrote on whatever scrap of paper was handy--receipts, envelopes--and copied them into the notebook later. The process was completely random except for the fact that I used the pages in order. Voila: a journal.

It taught me that keeping a written repository of one’s thoughts is even more intensely personal than I’d suspected. The form, that is, as well as the content. As we know, blogs and social media tend to blur the boundary between personal and public. We’re encouraged to share the minutiae of our day, but regardless of how many people actually read what you write, all these posts must be written for the illimitable audience of strangers.

Thus, a blog is truly not a journal--not kept as a record of one’s undigested interior reflections. A blog is a piece of work for publication. A journal is source material.

I know that there are wonderful visual and tactile artworks created from journaling, too. In Santa Fe, an artist named Gail Rieke keeps journals of her travels, comprising numerous and varied objects and scraps. Her form of the journal varies with the experience, but eventually many of the objects she collects in this fashion find their way into compelling collages.  

When she teaches a journaling class, she shows her students how to let loose their preconceptions of what a journal can be. In the loosening of expectation, creativity has room to breathe. A lesson, there, for writers, too.

More waiting

While the MS of ABSENT makes the rounds in New York, I decided to begin working on short stories. My dear workshop friends were tolerant of my rusty steps in this direction, but gradually I have found that the countryside here in Washington County, halfway between Houston and Austin, is hospitable to fiction taking form.

One of the first long ones I finished, I sent out to Glimmer Train for its baptismal rejection. Duly received. So I set it aside and began on a few more. I have around ten in various degrees of completion.

A few months later I revisited the one GT had rejected and gave it a severe pruning. Then one night, about this time, I sent it out to Southwest Review, who were sponsoring a contest for emerging writers. (Some of us spend longer in the birth canal than others...) The award is the David Nathan Meyerson prize and I won it. My story, SILENCES, is to be published in the fall issue of that respected journal. I was so astonished when I received an early alert via email that I actually screamed. My husband thought I'd had some kind of attack. And perhaps it was, an attack of happiness.

Getting the blog read

I've begun to take one of the courses offered by MediaBistro--this one on how to get your blog read. Pretty cool, if I say so myself.

Apparently there is a technique to writing for the web and it appears to involve writing down. Down where? No place you can touch. (We're not into geology or altitude, here.) But we do operate within the framework of levels. In this case, it's levels of discourse and literacy.

If you've ever read the writings of our founding fathers, or more recently of George Eliot, you will see that daily commentary on the web is way different. Way.

Moreover, if you don't write into that difference, no one will be able to find your blog. I love the comment our teacher made: "Pure nirvana is when a writer can successfully combine creativity with web writing." Because that's the thing: we're not talking about beautiful or shapely sentences. We're talking about "search engine optimization." SEO. A three letter non-word.

We are, you see, wanderers on a new planet where writers no longer write for readers or editors. We now write for Google.