Tomatoes and Cucumbers

These days it must seem a luxury to have a garden, to have enough land to plant and harvest your own vegetables, fruits and berries, but it was not always that way. Not long ago, it was a necessity. Stores and markets were only for those foodstuffs that you could not grow yourself. If you have an historical bent, and it is focused more on the people and how they lived rather than the big events, this will not be a surprise.

Subsistence gardens were the norm even in the depths of cities. Less than 100 years ago, livestock was found in urban environments with cows, pigs and chickens being raised in Boston, New York City etc. There are still vestiges of this in the community gardens and victory gardens often found in these cities.

The very idea of buying produce that one could grow was antithetical to the values of those times. Household economists avoided purchasing in favor of cultivating. But as we became an industrial, then a service, and now an information economy, we have drifted further and further away from the earth. Our fruits and vegetables come from the supermarket with identifying stickers so that the cashiers don't need to identify the unfamiliar, our meat is packaged in plastic, our foods created in huge vats in factories to save us the effort of even having to look at the uncomfortably organic shapes.

So many things now are cookie-cutter; standardized, sanitized, de-scented, bleached, colored, sorted, all to achieve a kind of homogeneity that is not found in nature. Consistency trumps flavor. Sameness is king. There is a new luxury today, and it is an expensive one. It costs us money, health, and pleasure. It is the luxury of disgust. As corporate farmers and food processors divorce us from our roots, they remove the knowledge of that which sustains our life and substitute a horror of dirt and of nature. The very idea that a caterpillar may have once crawled over the surface of a tomato repulses people. A bird landing on an apple tree makes many people reject the fruit. They should be more concerned when animals refuse to share the food.

My neighbor was a sweet lady. She and I occasionally traded produce. Until her death a few years ago, she was still active, vital, and to my great benefit, an avid gardener. We both eschew chemical fertilizers and insecticides, so neither of us hesitated about eating the food fresh of the vine or bush. What a delight. She appeared at my door one day with four large and gorgeous yellow pattypan squash, and four thin and warty cucumbers. After selfishly slicing a cucumber, adding just a pinch of salt and treating myself to an alfresco lunch on the back porch, I gathered a quart of ripe blueberries for her and left them on her doorstep.

These days many folks think that cucumbers are there merely for texture. They douse them with processed salad dressing to the point that one can no longer taste the vegetable. That is no great loss since the cucumbers one buys from the supermarket are tasteless to begin with. But those from a sun-warmed garden, inconsistent in shape, with warts and mottled skin, do have flavor, one that you should not ruin by the violence of modified starches and ersatz "natural flavors" of a supermarket salad dressing.

Perhaps I've been spoiled. I lived in Southern Italy when I was younger. Gardens abounded. Refrigerators were few. You harvested the food for the day, or bought food that had been grown within a few miles. The travesty we know here as Italian salad dressing was nowhere to be found.

To make an Italian salad, one rinsed the leaves of the lettuce to remove the sand and any remaining insect life. You tore the leaves into the proper size, removing areas of brown where some creature had enjoyed a bit of it before you, and made one or two additions; perhaps some olives, some other greens, a slice or two of radish. To dress it was simple. A glug of olive oil a squeeze of lemon and a pinch of salt. Just enough additional flavor to enhance, rather than disguise the green, crisp, and slightly bitter leaves. Here, in the US, a salad is most often a mess of sugary glop with chemical flavors hiding a tasteless mound of cloned leaves, genetically altered to repel insects and grow to a uniform shape for easy harvesting.

To me, the perfect taste of summer is the tomato sandwich I learned to make in Naples. Here is the recipe:

1. Early in the morning (5 or 6 am is best), walk down to the local bakery and buy a loaf of freshly-baked, crusty Italian bread.
2. Carry it home and put it on the counter to cool. You may want to cover it with a light dishtowel to keep the flies off.
3. At 1 pm, go to the garden and pluck two ripe sun-warmed tomatoes. Plum tomatoes are best, but they should be real ones, the type that are now called "heirloom" and fetch high prices because they cannot be machine harvested.
4. While you are in the garden, pluck a stem of basil and, unless you have some in the kitchen, you might as well grab a bulb of garlic.
5. Back in the kitchen, find the olive oil.
6. Slice the tomatoes into thick slabs.
7. Peel, crush and mince two or three cloves of garlic.
8. Slice about five or ten leaves of basil into thin strips. (You don't need to bother wiping the knife off between jobs ... don't be silly.)
9. Slice the loaf of bread in half, parallel to its base and open it up.
10. Drizzle both halves with a good amount of olive oil.
11. Sprinkle the bottom half evenly with the garlic and shredded basil.
12. Lay the tomato slices across it with the slices overlapping slightly.
13. Take a pinch of coarse salt and scatter it over the red surface.
14. Place the other half of the loaf on top.
15. Cut the sandwich in half and place it on a plate.
16. Put a handful of olives next to it.
17. Pour a glass of mineral water with a squeeze of lemon (or if you want ... a glass of good Chianti).
18. Take the plate and glass out to the garden to the chair and small table under the fig tree.

Serves one.

Meditation on Snow

I promised to keep writing, but the black humours overcame me and I sank into the depths again. Having given up drinking, oblivion was denied me. Having given up smoking, the solace of slow suicide was also unreachable. Which leaves me no recourse except to accept the slow progress of life.

I have struggled to the surface in time for the snow.

It occurs to me that snow is much like an antidepressant medication. It covers the the world in a blanket of fresh crispness like a bed made with freshly ironed sheets (a metaphor I will promptly discard). Winter's appearance of brilliant purity may be nature's way of making up for the dark cold depths of the longer nights. Would that it could.

For the chronic melancholic it is merely a facade.

Beneath the pristine surface, the detritus lies in frozen suspension. Only temporarily hidden are the results of emptied dog dishes, the rubble of the wrappers of fast food and fast sex resisting decomposition and waiting to rise from their fastness in Spring. Should I write a book to be called "A la recherche du temps rapide"?

The chemicals keep winter always. I feel like the Oscar Wilde's selfish giant without even the mirage of faith. My winter is psychopharmaco with out the logic. The balance is maintained. No thaw can be permitted to allow growth for it would also let the garbage bubble muddily to the surface. I am wrapped in winter as a mummy is wrapped in bandages, as a monk is rapt in meditation immobile in opposition to the lust of the enraptured raptor dipping its hooked beak in the steam of its prey.

I am snowbound.

Where's that goat-footed balloon man?

Starting up again

I haven't posted in a long time. I will try to remedy that in two ways: I am going to start rolling up my multiple blogs into this one. The only exception will be the Jerry Lettvin Memorial blog which will be converted into a series of static web pages.

There are a couple of things that I need to make clear.

First, although I call this a memoir, you can expect to see many different types of content: poems, stories, recipes, and rants. I will do my best to label things appropriately so that they can be found.

Second, I write lengthy pieces. I'm old school that way. I'm not writing for your benefit, but for my own. As a result, you may get to your tl;dr limit faster than I get to my point. If you're bored then go away. I probably won't even notice.

Later today I will start to post some of the backlog.

The Time Traveler

In September of 1970, I started working at an herb shop called The Herb Shop, on Chapel Street in New Haven CT. It was an offshoot of an organic food store on Whalley Ave. called ... that's right, The Food Store. I worked with John Thompkins who was a co-owner of both.

We had several enterprises working in the shop. We sold books on herbalism, spices and herbs for cooking, herbs for healing, custom blended perfumes (my particular specialty), and some kick-ass legal herbal smoking mixtures.

We didn't do a lot of business. Often the morning's profits were blown on a bagful of eggrolls from the Chinese restaurant two doors down. But there was a steady clientèle for our curry and chili powders, Mexican and Middle Eastern saffrons, and other culinary spices. The customers for medicinal herbs were more sporadic. We'd have a run on elderflower and mint during cold season, and once when there was an outbreak of VD we did a huge amount of sales of uva ursi and similar herbs.

I was usually the only person in the shop. I became fairly expert in the use of old Materia Medicas, Culpepper's Herbal, and Jethro Kloss' Back To Eden.

The sideline I started in natural fragrances became something of a style. I'd send the prospective customer to have their horoscope done and palm read, then I would do a tarot reading and blend the perfume accordingly. It wasn't entirely bullshit. I had a bit of a nose, had experimented with different skin chemistries, and seemed to have an instinct for the right combinations. I probably could have done it without all the new age folderol but people liked it.

My favorite customer was Tom. Tom was always dressed nicely with a spotless white shirt and striped tie under a grey suit. He also wore a battered old Panama hat that emphasized the mahogany of his skin. He carried himself with dignity and grace and was both charming and courtly.

When he first came into the shop, he asked if I would let him browse the labeled jars behind the counter. I assured him that he was welcome to. After about 30 minutes of study, he came back to the counter and wrote out a list. He was asking for so many ounces of hyssop, and about half that of thyme and on and on. There were about 15 different herbs on his list.

I pulled out a number of plastic bags, but he stopped me. "If you don't mind, please just put them all in the same bag. Paper if you have it."

The mixture didn't sound edible to me, nor particularly potpourri sweet (although it did include dried rosebuds), but he was the customer so I created the mix for him. He laid a few well-worn dollar bills on the counter in payment, thanked me and walked out. About a week later he was back with a different list of herbs. This became a regular event.

After a while my curiosity got the better of me and I asked him what he did with these seemingly illogical blends. He was polite but didn't answer. It took several more visits before he sighed and shook his head.

"Well son," he said, "I've lived through a lot of lives. I was a carpenter in China, a farmer in France, a soldier in Russia, an olive picker in Italy, and a stonecutter in Egypt."

I looked at him in amazement. He was certainly old enough to have done all those things but somehow it didn't seem likely. "When were you in Italy?" I asked. "I lived in Naples for a couple of years."

He chuckled, "It was long before you were born, son. As I recollect, it was back in the time of the Borgias."

Well of course I knew he was either crazy or deluded, but he was a good customer and I still wanted to know how he used the herbs that I sold him. So I asked him to tell me more.

Tom told me that he had an unusual memory. He could remember fragments of each of his previous lives. The earliest fragment was from Egypt. I may have sounded as if I was scoffing when I asked if he had worked on the pyramids, but he shooks his head and said, "Oh no, nothing so grand as that, I did some house foundations and sometimes some roadwork."

I asked how it was that he could remember all those lives. "I can't even remember the name of my third grade teacher," i said.

"About 20 years ago," he told me, "I started remembering bits and pieces. It turned out that the memories came when I smelled certain things. I started developing formulas or recipes that would make it easier to remember. After a while I could make the memories of a specific life happen."

"How do you do it?" I asked.

"The herbs in that bag you just made up for me is the recipe that will take me back to ancient Egypt. I divide it into four portions and tie it into a linen bag, then I steep it in a covered pot of boiling water for an hour. I run myself a steaming hot tub of water and pour the herb liquid in. Then I climb in and close my eyes. It takes about five minutes until I'm walking down the streets of Memphis."

I was startled for a moment, as if there was some kind of a disconnect. Then I remembered that Memphis, TN was named for the ancient Egyptian city.

Over the next few months, he told me more about his past lives. I saved the recipes and the target time and geography of each, but I was never able to get them to work for me.

Eventually we couldn't keep the store going and had to close. When Tom came in for the last time, I had packaged up as much of the remaining stock as I could into his formulas, labeled them and sent him off with a year's supply of free time travel.

One of my better moments

In 1979 I was in the Navy and based on an aircraft carrier with a homeport in Norfolk, Virginia. One night, some friends and I decided to go off base to catch a movie that had just opened. I was looking forward to it. I love Brit comedy and The Life of Brian sounded perfect.

The problem was that Norfolk was a hotbed of televangelism so when we got to the theater, it was surrounded by picketers who were apparently horrified at the sacrilege of it. My companions turned-tail and headed back to the base. I decided to press forward.

As I moved through the crowd, it became obvious that none of the protesters had seen the movie. They were taking a pastor or other third party's opinion and in many cases they didn't know if the third party had viewed the film.

I had a secret weapon for dealing with such people, a clipping that I kept in my wallet for such occasions. When I was approached belligerently by a group, I waited until I was asked the proper question. Finally it came ... "Don't you believe in the bible?"

Of course I do," I replied. "In fact I have documentary proof of its truth."

They were a bit taken aback. "What do you mean?"

"The old testament predicts the presidency of Lyndon Johnson," I said, "and the mess he made of the Vietnam war."

In spite of themselves, they were impressed. They weren't expecting biblical knowledge from someone as irreligious as they assumed me to be.

I pulled out my wallet and said, "Yep." I nodded at one of the bible toters, "Look it up right now." I pulled out my wallet and took out the clipping. "Proverbs 26:17." I held out the clipping.

"He that passeth by and meddleth with strife belonging not to him is like one who picks up a dog by the ears."

They backed slowly away and let me pass.

My short career as a film-maker

The course I took in film-making was a basic introductory one. Always needing to be different, while the other students used small, modern, hand-held, battery-powered cameras with zoom lenses and shot color super 8mm film, I chose to use a monster of a Bolex with a three-lens turret. The Bolex had to be wound up every 20 seconds, needed a shoulder rest or a tripod, and shot black and white 16mm film that needed special processing.

I cobbled together an animation stand and had film splicing and editing equipment. An old army-surplus shoulder bag held film spools and extra lenses. (Deni had kindly drawn a very Dan O'Neill style Mickey Mouse on the bag flap.

I tried. I shot long traveling shots down deserted alleys, empty stairwells, and deserted rooftops, presumably trying to translate my angst into images. Long boring minutes of minutely filmed brickwork were so tedious that I couldn't even watch it to edit it. I finally edited it into a seizure inducing short piece that I almost immediately dumped in the trash.

Realizing that Andy Warhol had naught to fear from my work, I turned briefly to journalism. This lasted a few days in May 1970 and culminated with being tear-gassed on New Haven Green as I unsuccessfully tried to get close enough to Jean Genet, Benjamin Spock, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, or William Sloane Coffin to get a recognizable shot. (Those were the demonstrations at the Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins trial.)

My last foray was into animation. I still have the reel. It was the only color film I shot. Denise did the artwork and I worked out an infantile shooting script. It was a psychedelic countryside with a flowing river and glittering sun. A black egg rolls into the frame, breaks into three parts to become a bird shape, and flies away. The entire film was about 45 seconds long and took us an entire long weekend to shoot.

Thus ended my illustrious film career.

Wayback Machine

Sometime in 1970, Deni and I were living in New Haven. We were poor, but happy, quasi-hippies. We were both working for Yale libraries and I was taking a course in film-making at Quinnipiac College. (Just to help in time placement, my movie camera was a Bolex that held a spool of 100 feet of film, would run for about 20 seconds per winding, and weighed about 8 pounds.)

Sometime during that period we must have found a photo booth and sat for our portraits. As you can see, I was anticipating the "grunge" movement, and Deni was just drop-dead gorgeous.