READING AND EATING

This little patch of free time between semesters has rendered me nearly useless for anything but reading.

I have managed to cook a little — some homemade bread and, most remarkably, a quinoa salad with corn and zucchini and an olive oil/orange juice dressing. Very, very tasty. The recipe was from Vegetarian Times, a magazine I picked up at the co-op and will now subscribe to, having tested and approved of its offerings. I am eager to try its recipe for vegan strawberry shortcake, mainly because it's prefaced with something like "you wouldn't think this could be good, but it is." That sort of thing always snares me. It's like a challenge, a leap of faith that the sum of mediocre parts will be magically out of this world.

Speaking of strawberries, I was wandering around the co-op today, getting some quinoa (I have Rick to thank for introducing me to this ancient, wondrous food — the "mother of all grains," as the Incas called it), and I noticed that the strawberries were remarkably cheap — for the co-op. They looked plump and red, but I saw some hand-lettering on the price sign that said "as is." Huh? Have you ever seen such a thing at a grocery store? What in the world can that mean? That they taste like crap? (Generally, a store wouldn't be quite so frank about the worth of its produce, as all of us who've gotten a tasteless peach or mushy apple or sour grape know). That they've had complaints? That they're not really organic? That they're just not as good as they look?

As is.

Hmmm. I should have asked, because now it's driving me nuts. I may have to inquire tomorrow when I go back for some vegan margarine for my shortcakes. My diet includes dairy — boy, does it ever — but I feel obligated to follow the recipe to a T; that will allow me to judge in good faith whether it's "suprisingly good."

Above is a picture of a strawberry shortcake — nonvegan — that Erin and I concocted earlier this spring. We baked the shortcakes from scratch, sugared up some berries until they surrendered their lusciousness and whipped up some heavy cream with vanilla. Neither of us had made whipped cream at home before. It's shockingly easy, provided you have a hand-mixer. I was quite pleased with this dish, even though the cakes could have been a bit sweeter and lighter. Now I'm dying to see how the vegan recipe compares.

One thing I've become addicted to recently is a restaurant here that gets most of its ingredients from local farmers and ranchers. It has a lightly fried tofu sandwich that knocks my socks off — on a whole-grain bun with burger toppings. For a side I usually get a fresh-green salad with an apple-mustard dressing, but last time — I just wandered in for an afternoon snack — I got a bowl of peas and carrots that made me smile from ear to ear.

That was a big digression. I started out saying I had been doing little but reading. As soon as the semester ended, I made myself a big to-do list — I actually made this list while waiting for a tofu sandwich to be served by a hippie chick with dreadlocks — and this list contained the type of things you would need whole days to do, like clean out the basement, shave Rupert, seal my cedar steps, clean and wax my car, etc. Of course I haven't done any of this stuff. Most of it I totally forgot about as soon as I bit into my heavenly sandwich.

I have, however, managed to read some books — not in my usual 10-pages-before-bed way either, but leisurely, to my heart's content, for hours on end. I don't come from a household where people sit around and read for the better part of a day, and certainly not in the middle of the afternoon. I come from a household where, even if you're "retired," you get up early and make yourself "useful" for eight hours or so. You weed the yard, you "maintain" something around the house, you build a cabinet or clean a cabinet, you bake, you balance the checkbook, you do something or you help someone else do something.

I'm glad now that I came from that kind of household. I wasn't glad when I was young. I used to wish that my parents had been intellectuals or artists, but the older I get the more I appreciate that they were exactly who they were. I'm not like them, and I don't idealize them, but a bit of them — maybe the part that says "don't ask too many whys" — rubbed off on me, and I'm grateful for that. If they had been anyone else, I don't think this amazing book — Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men" — would have meant as much to me.

Not that its details bear any resemblance to my life; it's a very violent, cowboyish book about a drug deal gone bad. It's macho.

And it's very sparely written, the complete opposite of the lushly detailed, woman-centered Alice Munro stories I'm reading in "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage." Two writers couldn't be more different, and yet their sensibilities strike me as exactly the same: a certain stamina for living, for plodding on, even in the face of apparent meaninglessness; a certain sense of wonder about every day, every minute, every fact; a certain shaking of the head in disbelief — and resignation — at the situations that befall us. (Things happen to you they happen, says one of the characters in "No Country." They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.)

Something I can't stop thinking about from McCarthy's book:

He looked at her. After a while he said: It's not about knowin where you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it ...

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else.

Yes.

Nothin else.

As is.