The
smallest guarantee, the straw at which the drowning man grasps is remembrance.
– Walter Benjamin
Sometime
in my 50th year, somewhere in the middle of 2008 -- the “crash” year, though I
have to admit that at that precise point in ’08 I had not the slightest clue
about the real crashes yet to come -- I lost my desire to cook. Not lost really, maybe “taken away” is a
better way to say it. And it was not
taken quickly, like a punch to the stomach might take one’s breath away with
one sharp blow to the gut, but more gradually, in increments, like cold, deep
water would do it if one happened to be drowning in the middle of an ocean with
the choking waves competing for a share of one’s breath and relentlessly
tugging at what’s left of what would be now near-frozen human energy. You know
how it goes: once, twice, then a final third.
Bye-bye.
Well now,
this language is a little over the top isn’t it? Of course it is. But anyone who has cooked for kids and has
slogged through the pickiness and the rejections, the mono-chromatic choices
and the spills, the fights and the wasted food and, not least, the veggie-hate…anyone
that has been in that trench, to thoroughly mix my metaphors, knows that there
is no small amount of ambivalence and a slow drowning kind of loss in trying to
create good healthy food for anyone under around the age of 12. This tension between subject-caring and object-incomprehension
and the ambivalence about wanting to do the right thing for the right reasons
contrasted against the near-total foreknowledge of the recipient’s lack of
interest in, or understanding of, what you are trying to do is sometimes the
hardest part of cooking for this type of audience.
But that’s
not really what I’m thinking about here is it? No, what I’m thinking about here
happens in those other idle moments, when I have nothing better to do, when I
reflect, in general, on this strange kind of ambivalence about caring and
incomprehension. When I do this I’m forced by a trick of associative memory to
recall a moment in 2001 when I happened to pull a drowning kid out of a pool. Well,
not really a kid, let’s be more accurate. Let’s call him 180 pounds of dense-packed
adolescent muscle instead. Swimming with
my daughter, then about four or so, at a YWCA pool in St. Paul
That
afternoon, though, the pool was unexpectedly invaded by a group of loud teens
who proceeded to irritate us by throwing balls too close to our heads, by
cannon-balling nearly on top of us, and in a couple cases by pretending to
drown just for the juvenile laughs that no-one else found funny. Un-amused by this aggression and stupidity,
we moved to the deep end to buy ourselves some peace. So when one of the boys found his way next to
us in the deep water and mumbled “help” as his head went down, I was even more
irritated than I had been in the shallow end.
There seemed to be no escape from these ignorant kids and having been a
swimmer for so many years – competitively for eight -- I deeply disliked jokes
about drowning which is what I thought he was doing here. When he went down the second time it still
seemed like a very bad joke to my rational conscious brain but my subconscious
started to wince just a teeny-tiny bit and time started to slow down by maybe
just a half-beat because I began to realize something didn’t feel quite as
right as it should have. When he went down for the third time, more or less
exactly like the cliché says it is supposed to happen, time started to crawl to
a near-stop as it finally dawned on me that yes he was, in fact, drowning…for
real. I glanced around me and for some
reason life started to look like one of those movies where the sound mutes
almost but not quite completely, a tin-cup over the ears kind of thing, and the
slow motion cinematography with amber hues kicks in.
And now,
looking back from today, this is what I see through the lens of my muted,
tin-eared, slow-motion, amber memory of that moment: I see the lifeguard
reading her book with one leg up on the arm of the chair at the far end of the
pool; I see the teenage “toughs” messing around on the deck, silhouetted in the
winter light coming through the steamed but frigid floor-to-ceiling windows; I
see a couple teenage girls in strangely outdated bathing caps, mouths mutely
agape, splashing each other in the shallow end; I see my daughter’s silent
irritation at my sudden inattention. I
could also see, in that strange silent moment, that not a single person in the
entire pool room realized that this boy was drowning – not a single person,
that is, except me. No one had any clue
what was happening and I realized in that precise moment in time and in that
exact place that no one except me could do anything about what was unfolding
right in front of my eyes.
With
vocal cords trembling, I commanded (though commanding with trembling vocal
cords is perhaps a bit of an oxymoron) my daughter to go to the edge of the
pool. I took one really big breath, and
then I went down…for him. And, of
course, in that one little bitty ill-advised move I made the most classic and
most foolish of all underwater rescue mistakes. I went in from the front. When I reached for him -- down probably a
couple feet at that point -- he did what all drowning men do: grasp for straws.
The straw in this case was my neck. And then me, my neck, and 180 pounds of
dense, non-buoyant, grasping, clinging, hard, urban muscle went, not up (no,
not up!), but down into the deep water. If
time had slowed to a crawl before, it now stopped absolutely dead-flat-cold. And I remember in that time-stilled “non-moment”
looking up, through my still-un-torn-off goggles, and seeing the under-surface
of the water -- which, when not drowning, can be a beautiful shimmering-shifting-undulating-silver-textured-mirror
kind of thing (which it still was), now about 4 or 5 feet away – and I thought
about how far away it looked; so far in fact that it could have been on the
other side of the universe at that point.
I also remember thinking that this must be what it looks like right
before you drown and in that silent non-moment I froze, totally paralyzed with
fear and cognitive impotence. Froze…and then, I unfroze. Through some type of grace, for which I am
now quite and eternally grateful, the moment passed and I fought my way outside
his grasp and, with the boy in the tow of my arm, swam back hard to the surface
dragging him to the gutter-edge of the pool.
And then,
surprisingly to me, it wasn’t over. It
got even harder as if the near-drowning was merely the appetizer to an
indigestible multicourse meal. A million
years had seemed to pass for me in what was probably less than a minute but no
one could yet see us or understand what was happening; no time had passed in
the real world while we had been struggling below. The guard was still reading
her book. The toughs were still horsing around by the windows. The girls were
still splashing in their crazy 1950s-style swim caps. And me? I was still fighting with
uncomprehending and very heavy flesh; I could not get him out of the water. Each time I pushed him to the edge, the
gutter, he would not take it and he would slip back below the surface. I tried three more times and then I had to
hold him while I climbed out of the pool, one hand around his wrist, to pull
him onto the deck -- my feet slipping on the tiles against the weight of this
huge, dense kid. When I finally (finally!)
had him up on the floor, a few of the other youths finally looked over but
returned to their games without comprehending or speaking and the guard, having
taken a break in her reading, waddled over and politely asked if she could do
anything to help. So politely she asked to help! And then, for reasons that still, to this
day, elude me she went back to read. After
that gross improbability, after the two of us lay on the deck catching our
breath for a few minutes (he was ok), no one said a single word. Not the guard,
not the other kids, not even the boy. I
don’t know if it was incomprehension or embarrassment or even some type of
resentment or fear that I did not fully understand. It was over and everyone
went back to what they were doing. At
that point all I could hear -- the movie-sound-track in my head having been
turned back on to loud at this point -- were the heated demands of my daughter
to play, she being disappointed that I had been distracted for those million
years (it couldn’t have been more than two minutes, could it?) it had taken me
to pull a kid from 5 or 6 feet under water to the deck of the pool. We tried to play for a few more minutes but
my stomach hurt and I took her home quickly and quietly -- without looking back
once at the horsing and splashing and reading people who had had no voice or
hands to help.
And how
do I feel about that incident now?
Scroll back up for a second to where I started with “…pull a drowning
kid out of a pool…” Sounds heroic doesn’t
it? Or brave, right? But that’s not what I remember at all. What I remember is not some kind of puffed up
TV-style bravery thing but rather the resentment (resentment!?!) I felt not
only at the joking around before something really, really bad happened but also
at being the only one there to solve the problem. In an odd, embarrassing way, I resented being
obligated or forced, rather than allowed to choose, to put myself at risk for
another person. I hated it at the time
and I feel quite ashamed about it now. I
also, more than anything else at all, remember being really, really scared,
especially as I looked up at the underside of the pool’s surface wondering how --
or if -- I could get there. And fear is not really the right sentiment; I doubt
there is a single word in English for what I really felt at that exact moment
five feet down. It was more terror and
calmness, resignation and anger, passivity and desire for breath, and a strange
kind of wonder all wrapped up into one incoherent, emotional instant. So: resentment, shame, terror, calmness,
resignation, anger, passivity, and wonder?
Really? That’s not what it’s supposed to feel like, is it? And then, of
course, I also remember the sheepish awkwardness and silence of everyone else
in the room who finally figured out what had happened. It was almost as if, in the end, no one
really cared or, if they did, the sooner they could look away and move on to
things that they could understand, things they did in “ordinary” time, the
better.
But let’s
take a break here. This, the drowning
man story, though true, started only as an awkward way of creating an imperfect
metaphor around cooking for kids and the sometime ambivalence that goes into it
and the sometime counter-flow of the drowning waters and heavy neck-clutching
weight of all the hard stuff in life that can work against doing the right
thing. The metaphor is imperfect of
course because, unlike my kids, I did not really love that boy...and my children
are not drowning...and I still cook. On
the other hand, the story maybe really was about trying to do the right thing
and the weird, mixed bag of emotions that can come from that effort even in the
face of some really hard stuff. Really
weird emotions. But, I do cook still. I
do it because it’s good and right and it’s care and ritual and I love them and
they need it. Do they appreciate it? Who
cares? They’re kids. Time to jump and
swim and dive, right?
Dad’s
Banana Bread
1
cup Sugar
1
stick unsalted butter
2 eggs
2
cups flour
1
tsp baking soda, baking
powder, salt
3 ripe bananas
1
tbs milk (subst. heavy
cream)
½ cup mini choc chips (subst. dark
cocoa chips)
~ turbinado sugar
~ vanilla
pre-heat
oven to 325
mix sugar
and warmed butter with elec beater
mix in 2
eggs
mix dry
ingredients
mash
bananas with milk
mix
banana mixture, creamed sugar, choc chips, vanilla
pour into
buttered baking pan
sprinkle
sugar on top
bake 1:10
rest :15
remove
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