The Point of the Journey is the Journey
Love is in the moment. It is always the moment.
Some people follow recipes and some people don’t. Some people look to see the beauty of what has been done and some look to see what still needs to be taken care of. Now the world is not as dualistic as this, but on the day of judgment, that’s the way that I think.
I don’t know why I bought spaghetti squash, perhaps because there were two of them for a buck thirty-nine, and I don’t know why when the boss wants the grass removed from the boxes that I want to plant more plants. From a distance what is happening is difficult to see. From close up, you will find the second year of parsley. You will find roselle poking her head through the grass in the heat of the sun.
You will find a moment with the new maintenance man.
He brings you a hose to keep what already grows still alive. You consider the way the purple flowers of hyacinth beans wrap around sunflowers and through the vine of luffa, and you consider how to grow on a mass scale without interference, without water, in the heat of the summer. You consider how to do this while keeping the eyes of those who look from a distance satisfied.
On the edge of the stage in your yard where Tank and the Bangas once set up shop there are tomatoes budding. Unheard of in the middle of July. The reason this is able to happen, the only reason that I can see, for I did not plant the tomato, not that I remember anyway. Some cherry type dropped by a bird or by my fair weather raccoon friend or maybe many seeds in the scat of one of these animals. And of the many seeds, some came up and what else came up was long bean and lab lab and cayradia japonica and turmeric and big fat blackberries. All of these worked together in a manner that somehow allowed the tomato the perfect heat and space.
Maybe this is the difference between using a recipe and letting the ingredients decide. Maybe this line of reasoning is why you received an admonishment from Frank Conroy when just a boy of twenty four, how he said that the writer must pick the words. He also said that though a good man, he was not a big fan of Vonnegut’s work. It was too simple, he said.
I lived on a recliner, on a porch that summer. I fed corn to squirrels and wrote a story about a man who collected cans, a man throughout the story who may or may not be a squirrel, and maybe I let the words decide the story, and maybe now I do the same, and maybe I let the plants decide the shape and maybe there is error in this, sometimes a need to intervene, but there is also magic in this, unplanned connections that never could have been predicted.
You should see the way molokhia stretches up and through the long beans, past the okra, seeking for the sun. Tomorrow I will take the grass from the boxes. I will weed whack the spots to make the eyes feel safe. And I will keep the spot on the back edge fence where red cardinal flowers and bidens alba swing and dance with long bean and mexican sunflower, and I will keep putting loquat trees into the ground even though they keep getting pulled up.
Did you know people call these trees misbelieves, a bastardization of the Italian. Somewhere in this name is the notion of what I could never have predicted. In two separate spots, ten blocks away from each other in the 9th Ward, there would be a tree snatching thief who most appreciates papaya and misbelieve. Or maybe there are two separate bandits. And so there becomes more than just the chickens who peck and dig and knock little seedlings from their space.
These obstacles are producers of consideration, and I wonder whether there is room for consideration in a recipe book.
