Pollas Meat Market

I just finished college. I guess I am an adult now. Being an adult, it's pretty overwhelming. My future is a great unknown. Where will I be next year? Next month, even. Will I be as happy as I am now? Will I be able to make something of my life? The vastness, the blankness, and the uncertainty of it all has driven me to contemplate my past. The known, the familiar, my life as it has already been lived. When did that life become a memory, rather than a routine? When did trips to Pollas meat market stop happening, and why did it take me so many years to recall that they ever happened at all? Yes, the known and familiar past that I have chosen to remember in every fine detail are the trips to Pollas for lunch meat. On Kelley road? Off of seven mile? I don't remember. But here is what I do recall.

If we go to Pollas, maybe we'll see that nice guy who stocks the fruit and gives us cookies when we check out. And maybe we'll get ma to buy us those mini chocolate chip cookies that Miss Abrahms, the first grade substitute teacher, used to hand out if we were good. I bet ma will give in. When it comes to those cookies, she usually does. But she never gives in to the jello molds. Never. Towering in a fantastic rainbow of red, pink, green, and orange, the jello molds were forever a mystery. I still don't really know what they are, or what they would taste like, or if they are even for eating. Knowing that it would be useless to beg for one of these, I tear my eyes away and we are at the meat counter. Flies dart around, taunting the butcher and jumping from bloody bones to ham butts. On top of the counter, pickled pigs feet are lined neatly in jars, pink chunky hooves suspended in clear pink juice. If we are lucky, there will be a cheese sample next to the jars. I scan the counter for the red checkerboard paper dish. Bingo. Cheese cubes for everyone! Now it's time to get down to business. The butcher digs his finger deep into his ear, scratches it, and asks us what we want. "I'll take two punds of the Kraukus Poilish ham" says ma. He picks up the slippery pink cube of meat and flops it onto the slicer. "Very thin, please," says ma. When it is shaved paper thin you don't even remember the block it came from. And the white veins of fat are barely visible. I'll never forget the time ma got boiled ham by accident. Or maybe it was on sale and she told us she did it by accident. Either way, a boiled ham sandwich is much harder to get down than a Kraukus ham sandwich, no matter how thinly it is sliced.

Bread

I add sweet sweet
honey warm
to feed my little
yeasts

I wrote this poem on the sidewalk last summer after a baking streak that changed the way I look at bread. You would think bread is a pretty simple thing, right? Just water and flour and yeast. A substrate to make swallowing peanut butter and jelly easier. But a lot of care goes into making bread. And a lot of love. Those little yeasts are so helpful. They turn the process of baking bread from a chore to pastime. After making bread I feel as if I have just had a good time with an old friend. It is a lovely symbiotic relationship; I feed the yeasts and they feed me.

Annual Dig Up Grass Day

Today turned out to be my annual dig up grass day. This means that I go into a trance at around 6 pm and I do not stop digging my chosen plot of grass until it gets too dark to see. The ritual has been going on for three years now, and I always feel pretty good about myself afterwords. This year, due to unlimited resources at my disposal, I ended up with the foundations of a beautiful raised bed garden. It is amazing how invigorating it is to just dig up grass. To make a useless, scrappy, ignored piece of land into the life-giving center of an entire season! I already have carrots, beets, swiss chard, and sugar snap peas in the rich soil of this new raised bed preparing to germinate. But I worry about these little seeds. Barry Sanders the whistlepig has been my friend for the past couple of years. We have shared many pleasant, nonsense conversations. But I am afraid that his foraging habits and the quality of my little sprouts will put a serious strain on our friendship.

Just one Speck of Carrot

That's all it is; one speck of carrot. It probably only took a couple of hours to grow in the soil of Bolthouse farm. And now it is lodged in my sinus cavity. Just at the brink of that little shelf that separates the nasal cavity from the back of the throat. I have seen Oprah, I know what happens when you get a vegetable lodged in there. It begins to rot. And then you get chronic bad breath. And then people have trouble talking to you, so you either become a mute or you loose all of your friends. And then you get an infection and die, but it doesn't really matter because of what your life has become. Well, that may be an exaggeration, but it sure does make you feel pretty bad.

I Missed Out

Several great events happened at home this Easter. And I missed out on all of them.

1) Church in Greektown. This was the kind of church where you have to kneel to get communion. And they put a little paddle underneath your chin in case any communion dust drops off the host. And you don't touch the host, it is placed directly on your tongue. Well, Mary was kneeling with the paddle under her chin this Easter, and when the person handing out the body of Christ got to her, she stuck her tongue out just like she was supposed to. The only problem was, when he took one look at Mary, he knew she was a Carlin. And he grew up with the Carlins. In fact, Mark Carlin used to be one of his best friends. So as all of these thoughts were running through his head, Marys tongue was still hanging out. And you can only stick your tongue out for so long before it starts to shake. This is exactly what happened to Mary. Her tongue was shaking like crazy. She reports that in the end, she managed to get the host and swallow it.

2) Grandma M, after taking a coconut topped cupcake from Mary, declines a peanut butter cup offer because she is 'on a diet.' "How much weight do you want to loose?" Asked Grandma Padalino. "Oh, twenty five pounds," said Grandma Mancini. "Ten pounds?" "No twenty five pounds" "Oh, ten Pounds is not bad. Me, I can eat whatever I want to and I will always be the same, 135 pounds." Grandma M reaches for another cupcake.

3) Mary decided to start singing 'this little light of mine' at the dinner table. Grandma M, after refusing to sing and even laughing at Mary, decided to harmonize for her because she didn't know all of the words. So, when appropriate, she would chime in "i'm gonna let it shine."

4) Ma has been treating a callous on her foot as if it were a wart for over a week. She has been applying acid bandages to the bottoms of her feet, and realized on Easter that they were not warts at all, and now she has burned two holes in her foot. She wrote to me in an email, "Yes Liz, you have to be careful when treating imaginary warts."

All of these memories could have been mine. This is why you should go home for the holidays.

Trash Talk

Today the grass turned green. The daffodils bloomed. Barry Sanders the whistlepig was rooting around the back yard. Mike Kelley was pacing down by the river. When he saw me at the trash bins he nearly ran over to me, arms and legs swinging wildly to maximize speed. As usual, he told me what a great job I was doing with the invasive removal. And as usual, he dove straight in to offer advice in the art of ‘lolipopping’ these trees. ‘Using natural tools such as my hands or sticks, I prune the buckthorne to make vertical lines so that you can see the natural landscape,’ says Mike, advising me to do the same, and, above all else, consider the job an art project, the forest my canvas. He also reminded me to always remove the cut brush. ‘I find that as I remove the dead, living things replace them.’ I found this an interesting thing for Mike Kelley to say the day before Easter, and considered saying something like ‘I find that the living things rise out of the dead.’ I thought better of it, for there were only about four hours of daylight remaining. If you want to get into a discussion about life, death, Catholicism, and honeysuckle with Mike, you better start talking in the morning or else you will end up breaking the ‘open dawn to dusk’ rule.