Ode to Mussels (Line Cook Poetry #1)

A sigh unheard in the hot and sticky, as I view the carnage that I have unearthed. 

A night sans cozy ice bed

has left most of you,

unfortunately dead.

Lying amongst open mouthed brethren,

the survivors, the few,

await rescue.

Tap, tap, tap.

Anyone there?

The Cast Iron Giant and the Golden Wheel.

I wrote this piece two years ago, and it might be one of my most favorite. Recently found, I thought to change it, but I've decided that it is perfect the way it is.

5 Feb 2013

 

I think about my Grandfather a lot these days.

Today, Feb 5 2013, is the 81st day since I kissed the top of his head for the last time, and today is the first time I’ve made cornbread since he left.

 

For two and a half weeks in the middle of November 2012, my life was turned completely upside down. My time occupied with running errands, running to and fro from multiple hospital rooms, and making the family dog scrambled eggs. In my down time, I cooked. I cooked as if possibly giving my loved ones a coronary could heal the brokenness of our hearts and make everything better. Focusing on food kept my mind quiet for a precious hour or two. My Pops once walked in to find me perched precariously on a stool, up to my elbows in fifteen pounds of meatloaf. Those weeks taught me how important food was to my family; not just for nourishment’s sake, but the act of cooking together, sitting down together and the inevitable stories to be told while we ate, leaving us breathless for laughing so hard. And in the end, bringing us so much closer than I’d ever thought possible.

 

My cast iron skillet gleamed like a mirror as I pulled it down from it’s place of honor on the shelf and I had a ‘hello, old friend’ moment. The cornbread recipe and skillet in question belonged to my great-grandmother, and seasoning my skillet has become a weekly therapy session. Once in a while, I’ll have a flashback of my three year old self, legs swinging over the counter’s edge, watching my grandfather mix the ingredients, repeating each one back as he added, and finally holding my breath as the batter was scraped into the sacred skillet, which forty five long minutes later, would yield a perfect golden wheel. I remember riding along with him, as he’d make numerous stops around town to gift his cornbread to friends. In later years, he started to forget the exact measurements, but he always remembered the ingredients: sour cream, self-rising cornmeal, creamed corn, eggs, and oil (adding sugar was blasphemy). Luckily for him, by then I might as well have had the recipe tattooed on the back of my eyelids. Pinto beans and cornbread were a favorite food that we shared, and I never failed to oblige him when he asked.

 

I added my Martha Washington meal, then my corn, sour cream, eggs, and oil, and as always, held my breath as I scraped my batter into the sacred skillet. Forty five long minutes later, my skillet yields a perfect golden wheel that I know he’d be proud of, and I know he’s somewhere grinning, tickled to death that I’m still making it the way he taught me.

 

"The North thinks it knows how to make cornbread, but this is a gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern cornbread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite as bad as the Northern imitation of it."

—Mark Twain