NAKED BRINE
Once upon a time, I made a valiant attempt at reading William Burrough’s incomprehensible book, Naked Lunch. All I recall is that it had nothing to do with being naked or eating lunch.
Now, if you want a saga of naked breakfast that even the most simplistic mind can understand, you need to read my pathetic story:
Growing up a Litvak, the heresy of eating sweet and sour together was akin to a sandwich of liverwurst and cheese. Sweet-and-sour, we were taught, was the province of “Polnische Juden,” who were of lesser couth than we Lithuanians.
To signify that I am now divorced from culinary prejudice, I soak any foodstuff in a sweet-sour brine of sugar and vinegar or any other ingredients that meld sweet with piquant: cucumbers, cabbage, beets, peppers, tongue, herring, salmon, you name it.
Pickling vegetables and fish do not smell like roses. Linda, who does, insists that I relegate my pickling to the garage, where their fumes mingle with the others. To obtain the full effect of the brine, they must be turned daily.
Now I will tell you the embarrassing truth. I prefer to walk around the house naked. I make the bed, clean up yesterday’s newspapers, make the coffee and visit the garage to stir my pickling brine. I typically perform my naked stirring dance while Linda is out exercising.
One morning, I was busily turning my herring. Linda would not be home for another 15 minutes. A dreadful miscalculation. Just as I stood full-frontal in my naked, corpulent glory, the garage door rumbled open for all the neighbors to behold.
What would you do? I grabbed the ladle and scrambled up the steps. I tripped, all 260 pounds of me, and fell forward, dripping pickling juices.
The aftermath? A huge hematoma on my head, a bloody nose, scraped arms, 20 visits to the chiropractor, sciatica. And of course, Linda bursting with schadenfreude, “Didn’t I tell you to get dressed?”
The worse admonition, though, boomed down from God: “Who told thou that thou wast naked?” He bellowed. “Why don’t you keep a dispenser of fig leaves next to the door? All this and you dare call yourself a Litvak?”
July 26, 2005
July 15, 2005
A COVENANT OF PEACE OVER LAPIS LAZULI
I am a sucker for lapis lazuli. Perhaps that’s because my simplistic taste in colors draws me to Crayola-crayon blue. Perhaps it’s that I fell in love with its alliterative name the first time I read it in the book of Exodus. Regardless, I own about 15 pairs of lapis cufflinks, most purchased off eBay during a manic episode.
I otherwise wear no jewelry save my wedding band. One day, I got it into my head that I’d like to own a simple ring with lapis inlay. I searched where? On the internet, of course, and found precisely the style from a jeweler whom I had good reason to believe was reputable. The ring arrived, a perfect fit to all aesthetic expectations.
One day, though, I gave the ring a knock, and a big chunk of the lapis fell out. The jeweler would simply not make good on it. I took the ring to a reputable lapidary. Could he replace the lapis? He took one look and announced, “Why? All you have now is high-quality blue polymer.” End of story.
You and I will never forget the day that radical Muslim terrorists bombed the London underground. That very day, Linda and I were strolling the “Rodeo Drive of Toronto.” What do we behold but a jeweler who specializes in . . . lapis. There before our very eyes was a clone of my ring.
I ask the proprietor if it is Afghani lapis. Yes, he says, the finest quality.
We warm to each other. With trepidation, I ask him his nationality.
“Do you promise not to hold it against me?”
I shake my head.
In a hush, he tells me that he is Afghani.
He asks me my nationality. I know that he has already figured out that I am American, that he is looking for something else. I ask if he promises not to hold it against me. He, too, nods his head.
“I am Jewish. You must be Muslim.”
We shake hands. “Well,” I say, “I guess we’ve signed our own peace treaty.”
He agrees, calls his wife and daughter from the back and introduces them.
Now I tell him of my interest in the ring. I tell him the story of its counterpart, the lapis-cum-polymer one from the internet.
“Sir,” he says. “Do you like this ring? If you do, I will cast another one in your size. I will have to charge you $30 for the additional gold. I will send it to you. Please take it to any lapidary you wish. If you want to keep it, send me a check. If for any reason you do not want it, simply send it back to me.”
“You trust me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you speak like an honest man.”
Let’s not be naïve. This momentary exchange between Muslim and Jew may not portend of a world free from cataclysm and strife. If nothing else, though, it was a stirring reminder that God has made a good way for us, a word or two here, an island of trust there, a serendipitous counterpoint to mangled bodies beneath metropolitan London.
Then I think of the Oriental proverb: “When a butterfly flutters its wings on one side of the world, its power can be felt on the other side.” I dare to wonder whether my lapis merchant and I might be a couple of those butterflies.
How the fluttering works its way to the other side of the world, God only knows. Maybe the child was impressed by the beneficence of his father. Maybe his father explained his beneficence to him. Maybe I will regale my own children in this story of extraordinary trust. Maybe the waves of influence will ripple outward. All I do know is that war may end through physical domination, but peace is of the metaphysical world, a world in which miracles may be consummated even over an inert chunk of lapis lazuli.
I am a sucker for lapis lazuli. Perhaps that’s because my simplistic taste in colors draws me to Crayola-crayon blue. Perhaps it’s that I fell in love with its alliterative name the first time I read it in the book of Exodus. Regardless, I own about 15 pairs of lapis cufflinks, most purchased off eBay during a manic episode.
I otherwise wear no jewelry save my wedding band. One day, I got it into my head that I’d like to own a simple ring with lapis inlay. I searched where? On the internet, of course, and found precisely the style from a jeweler whom I had good reason to believe was reputable. The ring arrived, a perfect fit to all aesthetic expectations.
One day, though, I gave the ring a knock, and a big chunk of the lapis fell out. The jeweler would simply not make good on it. I took the ring to a reputable lapidary. Could he replace the lapis? He took one look and announced, “Why? All you have now is high-quality blue polymer.” End of story.
You and I will never forget the day that radical Muslim terrorists bombed the London underground. That very day, Linda and I were strolling the “Rodeo Drive of Toronto.” What do we behold but a jeweler who specializes in . . . lapis. There before our very eyes was a clone of my ring.
I ask the proprietor if it is Afghani lapis. Yes, he says, the finest quality.
We warm to each other. With trepidation, I ask him his nationality.
“Do you promise not to hold it against me?”
I shake my head.
In a hush, he tells me that he is Afghani.
He asks me my nationality. I know that he has already figured out that I am American, that he is looking for something else. I ask if he promises not to hold it against me. He, too, nods his head.
“I am Jewish. You must be Muslim.”
We shake hands. “Well,” I say, “I guess we’ve signed our own peace treaty.”
He agrees, calls his wife and daughter from the back and introduces them.
Now I tell him of my interest in the ring. I tell him the story of its counterpart, the lapis-cum-polymer one from the internet.
“Sir,” he says. “Do you like this ring? If you do, I will cast another one in your size. I will have to charge you $30 for the additional gold. I will send it to you. Please take it to any lapidary you wish. If you want to keep it, send me a check. If for any reason you do not want it, simply send it back to me.”
“You trust me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you speak like an honest man.”
Let’s not be naïve. This momentary exchange between Muslim and Jew may not portend of a world free from cataclysm and strife. If nothing else, though, it was a stirring reminder that God has made a good way for us, a word or two here, an island of trust there, a serendipitous counterpoint to mangled bodies beneath metropolitan London.
Then I think of the Oriental proverb: “When a butterfly flutters its wings on one side of the world, its power can be felt on the other side.” I dare to wonder whether my lapis merchant and I might be a couple of those butterflies.
How the fluttering works its way to the other side of the world, God only knows. Maybe the child was impressed by the beneficence of his father. Maybe his father explained his beneficence to him. Maybe I will regale my own children in this story of extraordinary trust. Maybe the waves of influence will ripple outward. All I do know is that war may end through physical domination, but peace is of the metaphysical world, a world in which miracles may be consummated even over an inert chunk of lapis lazuli.
July 14, 2005
KNOBBY KNISHES AND CARCINOGENIC "ENDS"
Mrs. Friedman has likely gone on to her heavenly reward, but her influence lingers in my perennial struggle with obesity and bittersweet memories four decades old. Ominous numbers tattoed to her forearm, she sent two sons through medical school, wore a God-awful sheitel and spoke mangled English through a goulashy Hugarian drawl. Hence, the name of her well-garlicked establishment, Hungarian Kosher Sausage Company, situated in once glorious Albany Park on Chicago’s northside.
“Hungarian” was never to be confused with the grossly mediocre Romanian Kosher Sausage Company, which cranked out provender without passion from a retrofitted supermarket in a neighborhood that bore nary a whiff of Yiddishkeit.
One phrase that Mrs. Friedman’s Hungarian accent could not obfuscate was “my boys.” To be one of her boys inferred special considerations: a look-who’s-here greeting, hyper-fatty deli rejects squirreled away just for us, and a spate of other minor indulgences. She still made us pay full price for “real” food, but then again, I cannot remember even once purchasing so much as a quarter-pound of real pastrami over her counter.
What then? The roundtrip from Yeshiva to Mrs. Friedman’s domain was 16 miles through Chicago’s ooze-along traffic. But, the lunches at Yeshiva were infamous. So, two, three times a week we commandeered Mike Myers’s car for a lusty Mittagessen of sodden meat knishes and “ends.”
The knishes were misshapen, underbaked rejects with an enticingly gooey filling of ground corned beef, onions and garlic, bound with egg and tallow. They were so greasy that one dare not lay them on a talllis or a page of Chumash for fear of permanent desecration.
Ah, “ends.” Have you figured out what they are? A week’s worth of the fattiest, gnarliest chunks of leftover corned beef, pastrami, roast beef, bologna, salami – all rejected from sale to respectable customers and secreted away under the counter, because they were “ends.” These were so patently unhealthy that even Mrs. Friedman sternly warned me in all my rotundity to stay away from them.
On occasional Sundays, Mrs. Friedman would slather fatty flanken with a rub of paprika and garlic, then smoke them to an unctuous veneer. If you didn’t wash your hands meticulously, your steering wheel got so greasy that odds of getting home without an accident were all but nil.
Were misfit knishes and ends ever takeout food? No, never. Not that Hungarian had an al fresco courtyard shaded by gay umbrellas. We dined at vinyl-topped stools surrounding a wheezing freezer that vaguely resembled a coffin, a portent perhaps of the years that saturated fat stole from our lives. A bottle of Plochman’s “real Chicago-style” mustard passed among us as we squeezed and schmeered knishes and “ends” on butcher paper. Did we ever bring back orders for Yeshiva boys left behind? Go get your own. Couldn’t find a ride to get you there? Mike Myers’s Chevy Nova held five. Otherwise, toughies.
Ultimately, the Albany Park neighborhood went bad, and Hungarian moved uptown. “Ends” disappeared, as did the coffin and stools. Likewise malformed knishes, as only perfectly shaped ones were now spat out by some hi-tech robot. Too many customers to afford a special greeting; take a number and wait like everyone else. They were selling weird foods like fried chicken and barbecue beef. Go ahead, why don’t you? Replace the Statue of Liberty with J Lo carved in halvah.
I wonder if any of her other “boys” of the ‘60s remember cockeyed knishes and carcinogenic “ends” or whether, despite two stents, I am the last one standing. If only I could find the rest of the survivors, I know that we would reminisce richly of forty years gone by and wistfully toast each other on the departure of our youth, Mike Myers’s Chevy Nova, the coffin, knobby knishes, “ends,” Mrs. Friedman, and all the rest . . . over heart-healthy carrot sticks dipped in yoghurt.
Mrs. Friedman has likely gone on to her heavenly reward, but her influence lingers in my perennial struggle with obesity and bittersweet memories four decades old. Ominous numbers tattoed to her forearm, she sent two sons through medical school, wore a God-awful sheitel and spoke mangled English through a goulashy Hugarian drawl. Hence, the name of her well-garlicked establishment, Hungarian Kosher Sausage Company, situated in once glorious Albany Park on Chicago’s northside.
“Hungarian” was never to be confused with the grossly mediocre Romanian Kosher Sausage Company, which cranked out provender without passion from a retrofitted supermarket in a neighborhood that bore nary a whiff of Yiddishkeit.
One phrase that Mrs. Friedman’s Hungarian accent could not obfuscate was “my boys.” To be one of her boys inferred special considerations: a look-who’s-here greeting, hyper-fatty deli rejects squirreled away just for us, and a spate of other minor indulgences. She still made us pay full price for “real” food, but then again, I cannot remember even once purchasing so much as a quarter-pound of real pastrami over her counter.
What then? The roundtrip from Yeshiva to Mrs. Friedman’s domain was 16 miles through Chicago’s ooze-along traffic. But, the lunches at Yeshiva were infamous. So, two, three times a week we commandeered Mike Myers’s car for a lusty Mittagessen of sodden meat knishes and “ends.”
The knishes were misshapen, underbaked rejects with an enticingly gooey filling of ground corned beef, onions and garlic, bound with egg and tallow. They were so greasy that one dare not lay them on a talllis or a page of Chumash for fear of permanent desecration.
Ah, “ends.” Have you figured out what they are? A week’s worth of the fattiest, gnarliest chunks of leftover corned beef, pastrami, roast beef, bologna, salami – all rejected from sale to respectable customers and secreted away under the counter, because they were “ends.” These were so patently unhealthy that even Mrs. Friedman sternly warned me in all my rotundity to stay away from them.
On occasional Sundays, Mrs. Friedman would slather fatty flanken with a rub of paprika and garlic, then smoke them to an unctuous veneer. If you didn’t wash your hands meticulously, your steering wheel got so greasy that odds of getting home without an accident were all but nil.
Were misfit knishes and ends ever takeout food? No, never. Not that Hungarian had an al fresco courtyard shaded by gay umbrellas. We dined at vinyl-topped stools surrounding a wheezing freezer that vaguely resembled a coffin, a portent perhaps of the years that saturated fat stole from our lives. A bottle of Plochman’s “real Chicago-style” mustard passed among us as we squeezed and schmeered knishes and “ends” on butcher paper. Did we ever bring back orders for Yeshiva boys left behind? Go get your own. Couldn’t find a ride to get you there? Mike Myers’s Chevy Nova held five. Otherwise, toughies.
Ultimately, the Albany Park neighborhood went bad, and Hungarian moved uptown. “Ends” disappeared, as did the coffin and stools. Likewise malformed knishes, as only perfectly shaped ones were now spat out by some hi-tech robot. Too many customers to afford a special greeting; take a number and wait like everyone else. They were selling weird foods like fried chicken and barbecue beef. Go ahead, why don’t you? Replace the Statue of Liberty with J Lo carved in halvah.
I wonder if any of her other “boys” of the ‘60s remember cockeyed knishes and carcinogenic “ends” or whether, despite two stents, I am the last one standing. If only I could find the rest of the survivors, I know that we would reminisce richly of forty years gone by and wistfully toast each other on the departure of our youth, Mike Myers’s Chevy Nova, the coffin, knobby knishes, “ends,” Mrs. Friedman, and all the rest . . . over heart-healthy carrot sticks dipped in yoghurt.
July 12, 2005
FRIES OR NO FRIES? WAR OR NO WAR?
My heart is not one of my healthier assets. Hence my recent 50-pound weight loss on my way to 70. Every time my cardiologist suggests throwing a new pill or procedure at me, I faithfully tell him to go ahead. At that point, he puts on his best Dr. Freud accent and tells me, “It’s not so simple, Wilson. You present a complex situation.”
I make a beeline for simplistic, unequivocal answers. He prudently weighs and ponders alternatives. He thus is more protective of my life than I am.
Ah, for every one of life’s decisions to be simplistic. Onions on that burger? Yes or no. Supersize those fries? Yes or no. Diet Coke or regular? Yes or no. A tad of health consciousness may play a marginal role, but the switch is basically on-or-off.
What about life’s larger and more ultimate questions? Funny, but we used to call these types of questions “ponderous,” in the sense that they were heavy, bulky, and inferring that they demanded careful contemplation and meticulous weighing of consequences and alternatives. To ponder is the precise antithesis of snap judgments and unequivocal decisions.
Pondering is not a natural human inclination. It begets frustration, impatience, the demand to assess alternatives, to find the path to compromise, to accept the legitimacy of other positions, even to acknowledge ones errors.
Rigidity in ones positions, the refusal to engage in pondering, seem to be the inherent human condition, or at least the well-condition response of our generation. Perhaps we should attribute it to the pervasive fries-or-no-fries simplemindedness of what Mencken called our “booboise.” Perhaps at the other end of the spectrum, we should attribute it to conservative fundamentalism’s theological-cum-political demand of one-dimensional determinism: Saved or damned. Heaven or hell. Pro-life or murderer. Us or them. Friend or foe. Cocky, know-it-all liberals have smugly responded with their own brand of equal-but-opposite self-righteousness, creating their own obstinate fundamentalism as insidious as that of the right.
Pervasive stupidity, intransigence of theo-socio-politics or whatever, rigid absolutism has not merely stifled lively academic debate. It has threatened our basic ethical stability, boding more of a totalitarianism dictated by the last one standing than the equilibrium determined by well-pondered decision-making and compromise.
Terri Schiavo, dead or alive? Ponder or picket? The legacy of Bill Clinton, demonic or visionary? Or will time be its ultimate judge? So too for both the Bush’s. Selecting Supreme Court justices? Inalterable political battle-lines or thoughtful debate of relative merits? Life begins at conception? Life begins at birth? Acknowledge that both positions stem from venerated ethical tradition? Or bomb abortion clinics? Attacking Iraq good? Attacking Iraq bad? I have my strong inclinations, but am I sure?
Let no one mistake the virtue of pondering for moral ambiguity. We will come to decisions. Not everyone will like them. They will have their critics, even vitriolic ones. But they will be thoughtful and debated. They will not be determined by camera-mugging, shrill talking-heads, intimidation and the politics of intransigency.
What have we gained by the dictatorship of the loudest? What have we lost by muffling and discrediting the prudent, compassionate voices that speak respectfully to each other and coalesce to contemplate the ultimate issues of our destiny?
The professor who went on to be my mentor in bioethics gently but summarily dismissed my vaunted knowledge of medical ethics. “You know all the rights-and-wrongs and switches to flip,” he admonished me, “but you have yet to fully understand what we are to ponder when we ponder.”
Now his admonition comes back full circle, as I think of pacemakers, ablations, stents and meds with which Dr. Rubenstein nurtures my cranky heart. “It’s not so simple, Wilson. You present a complex situation.”
Knowing what to ponder when we ponder, or even pondering at all, before we send our young men and women off to war, or abort a fetus, or withdraw a feeding tube, or let a man with an IQ of 80 “fry” in an electric chair – all of it is “not so simple,” despite the picketers and cameras right outside the door.
My heart is not one of my healthier assets. Hence my recent 50-pound weight loss on my way to 70. Every time my cardiologist suggests throwing a new pill or procedure at me, I faithfully tell him to go ahead. At that point, he puts on his best Dr. Freud accent and tells me, “It’s not so simple, Wilson. You present a complex situation.”
I make a beeline for simplistic, unequivocal answers. He prudently weighs and ponders alternatives. He thus is more protective of my life than I am.
Ah, for every one of life’s decisions to be simplistic. Onions on that burger? Yes or no. Supersize those fries? Yes or no. Diet Coke or regular? Yes or no. A tad of health consciousness may play a marginal role, but the switch is basically on-or-off.
What about life’s larger and more ultimate questions? Funny, but we used to call these types of questions “ponderous,” in the sense that they were heavy, bulky, and inferring that they demanded careful contemplation and meticulous weighing of consequences and alternatives. To ponder is the precise antithesis of snap judgments and unequivocal decisions.
Pondering is not a natural human inclination. It begets frustration, impatience, the demand to assess alternatives, to find the path to compromise, to accept the legitimacy of other positions, even to acknowledge ones errors.
Rigidity in ones positions, the refusal to engage in pondering, seem to be the inherent human condition, or at least the well-condition response of our generation. Perhaps we should attribute it to the pervasive fries-or-no-fries simplemindedness of what Mencken called our “booboise.” Perhaps at the other end of the spectrum, we should attribute it to conservative fundamentalism’s theological-cum-political demand of one-dimensional determinism: Saved or damned. Heaven or hell. Pro-life or murderer. Us or them. Friend or foe. Cocky, know-it-all liberals have smugly responded with their own brand of equal-but-opposite self-righteousness, creating their own obstinate fundamentalism as insidious as that of the right.
Pervasive stupidity, intransigence of theo-socio-politics or whatever, rigid absolutism has not merely stifled lively academic debate. It has threatened our basic ethical stability, boding more of a totalitarianism dictated by the last one standing than the equilibrium determined by well-pondered decision-making and compromise.
Terri Schiavo, dead or alive? Ponder or picket? The legacy of Bill Clinton, demonic or visionary? Or will time be its ultimate judge? So too for both the Bush’s. Selecting Supreme Court justices? Inalterable political battle-lines or thoughtful debate of relative merits? Life begins at conception? Life begins at birth? Acknowledge that both positions stem from venerated ethical tradition? Or bomb abortion clinics? Attacking Iraq good? Attacking Iraq bad? I have my strong inclinations, but am I sure?
Let no one mistake the virtue of pondering for moral ambiguity. We will come to decisions. Not everyone will like them. They will have their critics, even vitriolic ones. But they will be thoughtful and debated. They will not be determined by camera-mugging, shrill talking-heads, intimidation and the politics of intransigency.
What have we gained by the dictatorship of the loudest? What have we lost by muffling and discrediting the prudent, compassionate voices that speak respectfully to each other and coalesce to contemplate the ultimate issues of our destiny?
The professor who went on to be my mentor in bioethics gently but summarily dismissed my vaunted knowledge of medical ethics. “You know all the rights-and-wrongs and switches to flip,” he admonished me, “but you have yet to fully understand what we are to ponder when we ponder.”
Now his admonition comes back full circle, as I think of pacemakers, ablations, stents and meds with which Dr. Rubenstein nurtures my cranky heart. “It’s not so simple, Wilson. You present a complex situation.”
Knowing what to ponder when we ponder, or even pondering at all, before we send our young men and women off to war, or abort a fetus, or withdraw a feeding tube, or let a man with an IQ of 80 “fry” in an electric chair – all of it is “not so simple,” despite the picketers and cameras right outside the door.
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