Crescent Dragonwagon's Deep Feast

We interrupt these slow-moving meditations n the largest, deepest nature of food and eating (Part 1 and Part 2 of Will the Circle Be… with Part 3 still to come) o to bring you… garlic.

In Vermont, right around when we gardeners harvest squashes, dig potatoes, beets and turnips, and watch the forecast to get all the tomatoes in before frost — we’re also planting. Garlic.

This is  simple to do: Break apart heads of garlic, put each clove root end down in the chilly soil, with a few inches between cloves. Cover back up with soil. One could do this in September; I rarely get to it until November. Sometimes the soil’s already bladed with small sharp shards of ice. This year, though we had one early snow before Halloween, I could be doing it now, in December.

Each of these garlic cloves becomes, eventually, a head. But not for awhile. Awhile that seems as far away as summer does right now, though I know, cognitively, that it was just 6 months ago that I last harvested garlic, some of it on a hot July day when I’d just come up from swimming in the pond.

All summer long, I swim in our cold, secluded pond. The garden lies between the pond and the house. Coming up from the pond, I wandered through the garden that particular day and did some impromptu harvesting.

It’s almost as hard to imagine, now, swimming in that ice-glazed pond which will soon be solid white, as it is to believe the garlic’s there, vital, hidden below inches, soon to be feet, of snow. In Vermont, there are many years when we may not see bare ground from December until April.

Look past America’s Thanksgiving iteration, Pilgrims-Indians-turkey, and you’ll find a praise-song lifted throughout the world: the harvest festival. Look past Christmas, the celebration of the baby Jesus’s birthday, to the pre-Christian time of Solstice. No one knows for sure at what time of year Christ was actually born; it was perhaps the original good marketing, on the part oof the early Christians, to slide it in at the time of the year when the earth turned back toward the sun, and dark was once again eaten by light; a time that was already celebrated in many cultures.

Such festivals always reference not only harvest and religious occasions but time itself. Barren winter becomes fecund spring, riotous summer, fall’s abundant multiplicity. Then, again, winter’s little death. The shortest day and longest night of the year, Winter Solstice, marks the return to the longest day and shortest night of the year, Summer Solstice.

Since I’m a cook and gardener, Thanksgiving comes naturally to me, much more so than Christmas or Chanukah. I easily enumerate the once-a-year Thanksgiving dishes I make: sweet potatoes, which I do with brown sugar and Grand Marnier. Mashed potatoes, which I do with celeriac, mascarpone, an unconscionable amount of butter. A triple-layer torte renowned in my circle: bottom layer, homemade green tomato mincemeat; middle layer, pumpkin custard; top layer; a shatteringly crisp glaze of bruleed pecans.

Too, Thanksgiving falls right around my birthday. About once every 18 years it falls on my birthday. 2010, the year I turned 58, was one of those years. The last time my birthday coincided with Thanksgiving, I turned 40. The next time  will be in 2021. Assuming I am still on this mortal coil, spinning on our green globe — assuming the globe is still here, spinning — I will be  69.

I lived in Arkansas back at the time of my 40th birthday. I was not “just” a writer-cook-workshop leader but also an innkeeper-restaurateur. My co-innkeeper, to whom I was married, was also a hyphenated soul: an artist-writer-historic preservationist. We’d been together since I was 24, he 22. I spent my 40th birthday in our inn’s kitchen; he worked the front. Two seatings, 40 guests apiece, then staff Thanksgiving. Gorgeous food. My feet hurt by day’s end.

Was I happy? I think so, but I may have been too busy to notice. I was grateful, though: our inn and dining room were full of delighted guests; my friends George and Starr were playing hammered dulcimer and fiddle; I loved my husband and he me. Hearing the sounds, seeing the people, inhaling the roasting, simmering redolent layers of the familiar foods, the sage in the apricot-studded dressing, the roasting turkey: the incantatory repetitive power of that, again, in that place, was such that I barely noticed turning 40.

In 2000, five days after my birthday that year, my husband went out for his three-times-a-week bicycle ride. His bicycle and a small pick-up collided. He bicycled far, far away, up and into eternity.

When you get over a loss like this fully is never.

And yet.

I’m no longer in Arkansas, no longer an innkeeper. For the past eight years, I’ve lived in partnership with another hyphenated fellow, David Koff, a filmmaker-social justice activist-writer. I live in Vermont now, as I said. I am here three weeks each month. On that fourth week, I get in the Subaru and drive four hours south and east to Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, to spend time with my mother, who is 96.

Charlotte, half awake and half asleep in her green chair, bundled up and floating in time. When I sneak up and kiss her, she laughs and smiles and says something like, "Nice," or "Again," or "Oh!", or (teasingly) "What's that?" When I check on her in the night, same thing. Always a moment when I know we are in the right place at the right time, together, and I am grateful, so grateful. And astonished. And filled with joy.

“Will the circle be unbroken?” asks the old hymn, the one I have referenced before on this blog. Grammatically a question, it’s is usually sung as a statement.

I wonder a lot about whether life is or isn’t unbroken, unbreakable, particularly around this time of year. Mostly, I think it is both.

Those who sit at our Thanksgiving or holiday table this year may or may not be here next year. I am grateful for them now.

Thanksgiving, 2011, left to right: Corinne, Hawa, Charlotte, me.

I am grateful that I loved Ned in the past, too, and even in the present, though he is no longer around to receive that love. Time necessarily dims memory, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. But I once loved him undimmed and was grateful then, in the past that was once a now.

And I know that though I lost Ned, I did not lose love itself. (Can love itself, not love of someone, be lost? How? Where would it go? I know that this is inexplicable, but I know, too, with the deepest gratitude and amazement, that it is true. )

Conundrum: I could not know and love David (and be known and loved by him) had Ned not died. I am grateful that somehow, I’ve been able to accept this unacceptable fact. Which makes possible an undimmed now. Not a now without troubles, challenges, difficulties (and plenty of them, to be honest) but still undimmed.

David. Me. Vermont. 2009.

Conundrum: a relationship — that of me and my mother, the children’s book writer-editor Charlotte Zolotow —that has always been loving but, equally, difficult, at cross purposes, irritating, and largely unsatisfying  has come to peace in her extreme old age.

You don’t have to go live in a cave in India to “be here now.” Just live long enough. My mother has now mostly lost the past, so she can no longer pick over the scabs of all the real and imagined wrongs done to her by me and everyone else in her life. She has lost the future, so she no longer worries about what will happen, if there will be enough money, will everything be alright, will everyone get along. She resides in the present. She is one person now — not one for family, another for friends, another for professional associates. And that person feels what she feels and shows it, transparently. Most of the time, she is happy. She laughs and makes jokes easily. She teases and allows herself to be hugged and kissed and hugs and kisses back and is just… herself, without the wariness or vigilance that used to dog her (and drive me crazy).

I am amazed that we have lived long enough for this to happen: for us to simply love each other and hang out without any emotional impediment.

I am so grateful for that.

I am grateful, too, for friends, whom, I have heard it said, are life’s reward for family. Longtime friends like Starr and George, newer ones here in Vermont, like Gaelen and Rich, with whom David and I often share Thanksgiving (and for that matter Halloween and sometimes Christmas), at a table full of beautiful food.

Those tables full of food, often much of it I have made and fussed over, some of which I have probably grown (this year I did a turnip gratin, with my own garden’s Vermont gilfeather turnips, that was beyond over the top; everyone, and I mean everyone, went back for seconds and thirds). I am grateful for my gillies. I am grateful for all that sustenance and nourishment, for the sensual pleasure it gives the celebrants, that it can serve, for them, as the medium of benign connection… with each other, with me, with the earth and life itself.

Grateful, but always, simultaneously, with an inward kink: Who can forget that so many on this same earth have no food at all? Who can forget how many threats hang over this same earth, and not wonder how long life can be sustained?

We live with unanswerable questions like these because there is no other way to live. This being so, can we live in gratitude, anyway, no matter what?

I am grateful to my friend Shelley Olson, a composer-artist with whom II have been friends since we were in ninth and tenth grade respectively.

Shelley and I, a couple of years back, on the grounds at Tanglewood, which is just a few miles down the road from the now-defunct Stockbridge School, where the two of us met in 1966.

I am grateful for last Christmas. Which found me with my mother, and my mother without any of her regular and trained caregivers, when I had to take over with only the slightest idea of what I was doing physically. I am grateful that I could and did call Shelley. She and her husband Dilip, at fairly last-minute notice, hopped on the Metro North train from their home in the Bronx, and spent three days with the two of us. Together, we took care of Charlotte, and we did it well, though Shelley had even less knowledge than I did about how to do this (we watched You-Tube videos on how to safely do transfers, from bed to wheelchair, wheelchair to toilet, and so on).

Together, against all odds,  the four of us had a ball. It was one of the more improbable holidays I have experienced. But when my mother, who pretty much has to be feed, spoonful by spoonful, and who drinks only when cups or glasses are held to her lips, sat at the table, she engaged. All four of us had a real conversation. She teased and laughed and conversed — from an altered reality, true, but one anyone with a poetic bent could grasp.

And when it was time for a toast, her crumpled, arthritic hand, her arm, its flesh spotted and its thin tendons visible, rose slowly from her lap, a ghost of celebrations past. Somehow she reached for her wine glass. On her own. Unprompted by us, in any way. Somehow she gripped the stem of the glass. Somehow, tremblingly, she brought it to her own lips, and sipped.

I am grateful for that sight, which will stay with me, I believe, forever.

I am grateful that my mother now has caregivers I adore and trust. I am grateful for the memory of Shelley and Dilip’s extraordinary loyalty, work, and sense of adventure last year, and that, when they come out again this year, we will be able to eat together, giving and caring, certainly, but not caregiving (which, for my mother, who is non-weight-bearing and has a daunting number of medications, eye drops, and inhalers, is complex, and really does require people who not only love her but know what they’re doing).

So. Here I am, by luck, grace, karma, or chance. Here is my mother. Here are her caregivers. Here are my friends. At the feast.

We break. Yet the circle itself will forever be unbroken. That is a mystery which we can resist or accept, but with which we must live. Inherent in love is loss. Inherent in summer is winter. Inherent in endings are beginnings. Life’s terms are impossibly poignant.

And yet.

Tall, pale green spikes will poke up in next spring’s messy, sodden garden. The first thing! There will probably still be snow on parts of the garden, and the mulch out of which those green stalks arise will be soggy and much worse for the wear of the winter it’s come through, blanketing the soil, and what lays hidden beneath it.

But will be, this spring, hidden no more.

I am grateful for garlic.

Think about food and you think, sooner or later, about circles. About cycles, and roundness.

Whether we ever consciously know and acknowledge it or not, by being born on this round globe we sign a contract. We initial it with every drop of our blood, and renew it with every breath: I will participate in the circle; I will eat while I am here, and eventually be eaten. For as long as we live, if we are among the fortunate ones who have enough to eat, we will round our bellies as we grow hungry and then sate that hunger, again and again and again (often, in the developed countries, with bellies that are, or seem to us to be, too round).

We do this, all of us, until we leave physical life. The poet Wislawa Szymborksa, in the poem Nothing’s a Gift, expresses this:

“… I’ll have to pay for myself
with my self,
give up my life for my life…

I move about the planet
in a crush of other debtors.
Some are saddled with the burden
of paying off their wings.
Others must, willy-nilly,
account for every leaf.

Every tissue in us lies
on the debit side.”

But the solemn, sobering circle drawn by the tissue of physical being is just one circle.

We human beings also form a circle with each other, around the table. Around the food on the table. Around the flat circular moons of plates, the rounded bowls. Each meal is a twist of the kaleidoscope, the design of our human circle changing continually yet composed of the same basic pieces. This is, in the old phrase, breaking bread together. This shared nourishment is both physical and social.

That table we’re around: It might be covered with starched white linen (which arrived at the back of the restaurant earlier that day, from Peerless Commercial Laundry Service, a neat, paper-wrapped, string-tied package, a transaction to which, as restaurant-goers, we probably give less than no thought). The “we” who are seated around that table might be friends, or business associates; we might be gathering to make plans, make a deal, propose marriage, celebrate the birth of a child or grandchild, remember an absent friend.

Here, another person, perhaps several others, come and go, attending our needs. They are waiters; they “wait” on our pleasure. At a time when few people have servants, they “serve” us. They are both part and not part of our circle, usually considered only nominally more than the linen. “How much dill is in the cucumber sauce that comes with the poached salmon? “ we might ask them earnestly. “And is that salmon wild-caught or farmed?” Also outside the circle of the table and our consideration, but truly with us: the chef, in the kitchen, who is poaching that salmon, the farmer who grew the cucumber or dill, the person who caught that salmon, and countless others.

There are many other tables, of course.

There is dinner at home, in the “eat-in kitchen”, at least for those families fortunate enough (in our fast food discombobulated over-scheduled world), to eat together sometimes. This table’s bare wood, possibly covered with oilcloth; we ourselves will sponge it clean later. Or, perhaps we use place-mats, the ones we bought in Cape Cod that summer. Paper napkins, likely. There may be juice glasses if it is morning, wine glasses if it is evening, Sippycups if there are young children. The mashed potatoes (or rice or pasta), the sliced beef (or tofu-vegetable stir-fry), the salad and condiments, each in their own round bowl or platter, the round basket of bread — whatever’s being served is probably passed hand to hand. We freely help ourselves to seconds, an option we would not dream of at a restaurant table.

We may be eating in our pajamas at this second table. And there, too, more than eating takes place at other times: homework or bill-paying may be done, tearful conversations late at night with voices kept down so the children won’t hear. As we eat, the black-and-white tuxedo cat may wander into the kitchen and try to jump on the counter. “NO!” Down she jumps, and skulks away. The golden retriever may sit, patiently, longingly, by the person most likely to palm a sliver of roast to him. “How was your day?” “What did you learn in school?” “Could you pass the corn?” The kaleidoscope has turned. Bread is broken again. Another circle is formed.

The original circle of our forebears was not, of course, around a table, but a fire. Over it roasted a joint of yesterday’s hunt, if that hunt were successful. Food, shelter, story, as I always remind students when I teach a Deep Feast Workshop: human beings went out and killed the mastodon, gathered the roots, nuts and berries (food); dragged it back to the cave (shelter); and then painted what had happened on the ceiling of the cave (story).

Human beings are meaning-making animals. It is that need for meaning, for story, that separates us from the rest of the animals.

We need narrative, for human beings are filled with uneasy questions: who are we? why are we here? how do we fit in? why did what happened, happen? What becomes of us or those we love when we die? The attempt to answer these questions makes narrative. And narrative, I believe, created  and continues to create) not just philosophy, but  art, literature. And religion. And the holidays and meals that celebrate all these, as year after year cycles again and again, around and around.

Each holiday meal is also a circle, with elements both unique (to the holiday, the family, the religion) and universal.

The circle at the Thanksgiving table: traditional harvest foods which express gratitude and thanks, in the contradictory face of family love and tension. The need for connection and autonomy. For history, and for forgetting history; looking forward and backward yet being in the somewhat messy right here, right now.

The circle at the Passover table: ritual, reenacted bite by bite and page by page with food and story, commemorating liberation and survival; again in the contradictory face of family love and tension, connection and autonomy, past, present, future.

Christmas, He is born; Easter, He is risen — death and resurrection. And ham, crisscrossed with knife cuts, crucified with cloves. Sun-yellow round rings of cored canned pineapple slices. Unnatural cherries, red as blood. (And then there is the cake, remember? That Mrs. Nichols used to send over every Easter? Baked in a special mold, it was shaped like a lamb, with white icing and coconut to look like wool, and a bell tied around its neck with a pale blue ribbon? We still call that “the Nichols house” even though five or six families have lived there, have bought and sold that house, since the days the days when the Nicholses lived there…) Again: the contradictory faces, love and tension, connection, autonomy. History, and its opposite, forgetting.

The kaleidoscope turns and turns, “sailing in and out of days and over a year,” in the words of Maurice Sendak, “to the land where the wild things are.” Family love and tension; are we the wild things? Or is it life itself which is untamable?

The know-it-all uncle, such a pain in the ass, who picks all the cashews out of the dish of mixed nuts; the brother who borders on sociopathy, sowing dissent by barbed word and glower every Easter; the cousin who drinks too much and, with each emptied glass, tells us more and more about an ominous “they” who are trying to take away our rights. The one who will only eat cranberry jelly; the one who will only eat cranberry sauce. The one who will only eat pecan pie; the one who says, “Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without mincemeat pie,” even though she’s the only one who likes it.

I think, as you can tell, that ceremonial family feasts are usually ambivalent at best, the tensions of every day amped up by the increased expectation of Joyous Noel (or whatever). I think almost anyone who is honest would admit that holidays are rarely as perfect as the food photographs in Bon Appetit or the table-settings in Oprah Magazine.

Yet could today’s pain-in-the-ass become, in absence, a pain in the heart? Maybe. Maybe not.

Given that such difficulties, familial and otherwise, are almost always part of the circle, we usually do not ask the large questions: who, of those present here this year, will be here next year, and who will not? Perhaps this is because they’re not ours to answer; according to Jewish tradition, it’s already recorded in The Book of Life, presumably authored by God. “On Rosh Hashana it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. How many shall leave this world and how many shall be born into it, who shall live and who shall die.”

But I think it is worth asking questions we cannot answer.

And again and again and again, food gently suggests that we do, if only within ourselves. For food is always (even for vegetarians) about life, death, and how we participate in both. I called this participation, earlier, a contract. And it is. But it is also a sacrament, a deep feast, each bite of which confirms our connection to each other and the earth, our partaking, hungrily, of the mysteries which we cannot understand.

And dinner, which we can.

In Part 2, we’ll look at how the circle of particular foods and foodways lets some in and keeps some out, and why.