Morning Musings to Share With Love

I worked as a prep chef in restaurants. I made vats of chili, and
chicken soup, marinades for grilled chicken and pork, grandma's
chocolate pudding, greek spinach pies and pecan pies. I love to feed
but when I cook in huge quantities in the soup kitchen's Alice in
Wonderland pots and pans, my appetite shuts off. I have to go home
and take a walk and when my appetite returns, cook something
completely different. This is how I learned to cook way back then. I
would wake up and want to make something I cooked the week before but
this time I had to figure out how to make it for just me.

In order to feed we have to be balanced and fulfilled ourselves.
Perhaps hungry chef is passing along his deprivation. Maybe not.
Maybe the hungry chef is feeding, and tending to his deprivation. As
a child my mother was stuffing us with her hungers and neurosis and
greed and then pulling them out of us with laxatives and enemas. I
was sick to my stomach at every meal. I became phobic about the table
and the toilet, and terrified of my mother's mouth. She had perfect
teeth and wore red lipstick and sunglasses to the breakfast table. I
became fearful of digestion, the mysterious plumbing system we all
carried inside.

I remember walking into the kitchen while my mother was making
meatballs and she gave me a blob of raw hamburger the side of a large
marble. I poured myself a glass of Welch's grape juice to wash it
down. Two minutes later I vomited the purple mixture right into the
big white porcelain kitchen sink! Most days if I walked in while she
was making breakfast, scrambled eggs, she handed me a blob of cream
cheese. She always put a heaping tablespoon of Philadelphia cream
cheese inside the mixture sometimes she added kidney beans or
spinach. Food was love and food was the love we all craved and chased
after. I would sit in our kitchen pantry on the green vinyl step-
stool and hide. The pantry was slightly larger than a phone booth but
packed like the library stacks, with everything including a few
strange items like tiny cans of turtle soup. It was security to be in
there.

I wear a thin white kitchen apron all the time to cover my
vulnerable gut antennae. I still feel more secure being inside the
pantry. I am vaguely traumatized carrying my supper plate out to the
table in the next room. If I could I would have my kitchen table,
next to the oven and inside the pantry. When I lived on Smith Hill I
had a pantry with glass cupboards. The big enamel sink had a window
above it and while I washed dishes I had a view of a big maple tree.
The golden winter light would light up my rows of mason jars full of
rolled oats beans and corn kernels and decorative teacups. I sat in
there for hours. It was where I met my husband. He came to a party
at my house and we stayed in the pantry talking the whole night.

I am fifty three now, and my journey of food has taken many twists
and turns. I am back in the kitchen residing over the gigantic
Garland stove, in the church basement on my street feeding my
neighbors soup and bread, the universal language.

Inside the theatre of the kitchen, we perform and practice love.

I want my table to be a safe and lively place. In my fantasy painting
of the last supper it is the first supper of many. It is a round
table and seated there are John Lennon Ghandi BBKing Loinel Poilaine
Martin Luther King, Jimi Hendrix, all of the poets and writers and
dancers, all of the people in my city, my ancestors, your ancestors,
maybe the table goes around the earth! Maybe the table has troughs
for the cats and dogs birds goats and antelopes, and of course my
veterinarian and your veterinarian, my dentist, the police chief, the
Mayor, the street sweeper, the maintenance man, the garbage man, the
asphalt pavers, Dolly Parton, Willy Nelson, Willy Lowman, Edgar Allen
Poe, Mozart, Lucille ball. Everyone is invited to my table.

I am a journalist. I write in my journal every day. The magic alchemy
of sleep after waking and walking makes words be. Perhaps I am a
journalist on Jupiter or Saturn. The words come out of my feet while
walking and fly up through my oxygenated lungs behind my eyes and
into my brain. Just like I must take off my shoes while playing my
saxophone. I feel the music of the spheres swirling around us the
way flavors of the soup, must 'land' as the broth cools. Sometimes
the thoughts and scents land in us but they are always swirling by
like a river or the city's plumbing sewers and subways beneath us.
All we do is reach out and open our heart, and hand and look through
the microscope or telescope.