TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 130

[Tobie Shapiro]

January 24, 20000000007


Dear Everyman, Everywoman, Everychild,

	After a salutation like that, you'd 
expect an important message.  But I have none.  I 
am just up early in the morning, rubbing my eyes 
and wishing I could sleep longer.  Ah, but I have 
been trumped by my daughter, Feyna, who appeared 
in my room at 1:30 in the morning complaining 
that she couldn't sleep.  She'd had a half caff 
latte in the afternoon and didn't think it would 
bother her at night (Oh woe is to those who think 
these things).  I gave her two halves of a 
klonopin, a drug I have to take for my seizure 
disorder that she used to take for anxiety.  It 
makes me clonk out.  This morning she showed up 
at my door saying, "Guess how much sleep I got!" 
I guessed two hours.  I knew she wouldn't say 
this if the answer weren't dramatic.  "Nope," she 
said, shaking her head.  "One hour."  "Nope," she 
said again, folding her arms across her chest 
(under her breasts).  "Feyna!  You didn't get any 
sleep at all last night!"   "Right."  The 
klonopin didn't do it; the caffeine trumped the 
klonopin.  And she's got school today.  Three 
classes right in a row.  I told her, "Do yourself 
a favour, sweetheart.  If you're at school and 
you're nodding out and can't stay awake, just 
pack it in, come home and go to sleep.  It's no 
use spending your time futilely trying to stay 
awake when you're really asleep."  She nodded.

	Sleepless nights.




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Tripe

	I got a new pressure cooker.  It was 
capacious and streamlined.  I wanted to 
inaugurate it.  Pressure cookers were all the 
rage in the '40s, '50s and '60s, but by the '80s 
when this all took place, they had lost favour. 
It wasn't easy even finding one.  But I did.  It 
had a round weighted disk that you put over the 
top escape nozzle.  It was marked with the pounds 
of pressure at three different points on the disk 
and whichever you wanted, you would place the 
heavy disk over the steam outlet so that that 
number faced up.  Here was the sequence: you 
turned on the heat, then let it boil until steam 
was screaming out of the outlet, you then plopped 
the disk on over the outlet.  It would work its 
way up to whatever pressure you'd set it for, 
five, ten or fifteen pounds, and then the disk 
would begin to rattle, sputtering on top of the 
steam nozzle, vibrating loudly and singing its 
pressure cooker song.

	There were only two reasons why I wanted 
a pressure cooker.  The first was to cook 
artichokes in fifteen minutes.  The second was to 
cook tripe in half an hour.  Oh yum, tripe!  You 
can cook tripe however you want to and I'll like 
it.  I know it is not for everyone, but I have 
always loved it.  My mother used to make tripe 
whenever my father was out of town.  He turned up 
his nose at it, say things like, "Never mind, 
Mickey.  I'll eat it.  Marriage means sacrifice." 
So she stopped cooking it when he was around. 
Oh, I would have cooked it!  When I was growing 
up, I used to beg her to cook tripe.  Just make 
something else for him.  He doesn't have to eat 
it.  Make tripe because we love it.  Forget him. 
Of course, she was the one who'd have to cook an 
extra dish, but I didn't think that way yet.  I 
was a kid.  My mother would make tripe in a 
tomato sauce with dried porcini mushrooms.  I 
could have eaten several pounds of it.  She also 
made tripe soup with pozole (hominy), but not as 
frequently.  The tripe in tomato sauce was what 
her own mother, my grandmother, used to make for 
her family when my mother was growing up.

	Oh, for organ meat!  Ode to organ meat! 
Let us sing a song of organ meat!

	Liver, chopped liver, liver and onions, 
liver and bacon and onions.  Oh liver, thank you, 
God.  Heart, cut into cubes and wok fried with 
onions and napa cabbage.  Oh heart, take heart! 
Sweetbreads!  A toast to sweetbreads with that 
subtle flavour and delicious texture.  Nothing is 
equal unto sweetbreads, Ris de veau!  Then there 
is spleen.  Yes, you can eat spleen!  What a 
wonderful slice, all bloody and nice.  You can 
feed it raw to your cat, but you can cook it in 
wine and eat it yourself.  Here's to spleen, lick 
the plate clean.  And there are kishkes, 
intestines, chitterlings.  Don't bother blowing 
out the insides because it all tastes good, the 
package deal.  Give me those guts.  I am nuts for 
guts.  And did I mention tripe?  I did and I'm 
ecstatic.  Give tripe to me any old way.  I suck 
its furry surface of all the sauce, oh yes, and 
then I floss.  Tripe!  Yipe!

	With my new pressure cooker, I was all 
ready to cook tripe in half an hour.  I sallied 
forth and bought several pounds of the stuff.  I 
chopped it into strips and put a curried sauce on 
it, some wine, lots of garlic, and my hopes for a 
better more peaceful world.  Yes, if we'd all 
just eat tripe, this would be a safer, more 
elevated, more well nourished world.  We would 
all get along if we all ate tripe.  I am sure of 
it.  I loaded it all into the pressure cooker, 
locked the lid on and waited for the steam to 
come shooting out of the escape nozzle.  When the 
steam was geysering, I dropped the heavy metal 
disk on top with the fifteen facing up.  Fifteen 
pounds of pressure.  Then the idea was to wait 
until it started to wobble, and turn down the 
heat to low, set your timer and lick your chops.

	I went into the living room to say hello 
to Vogelsang.  And then the phone rang.  So I 
talked at length to my friend, Yvonne, who had 
news of her most recent trip to Europe.  The 
temples in Toledo, Spain, were consummate!  She'd 
had a tour of the sites of Jewish influence.  The 
tile work alone, astounded her.  I'd never been 
to Europe.  I'd never been anywhere outside the 
country, and I hung on her every word.  She was 
the traveller of the two of us.  She'd sent me 
postcards, but they hadn't arrived yet.  I told 
her I would look out for them.  Here I was in my 
little three bedroom house in Richmond Annex, 
thirty four years old and never been across the 
great waters.  We talked about her love life, 
which wasn't doing much of anything at the time. 
Neither was mine.  We reminisced about names and 
places we'd known and mused about where those 
people might be.  We talked about making a 
chamber music date.   We hung up in time for me 
to hear an explosion in the kitchen.  Oh my God! 
The pressure cooker!

	It was not just an explosion.  It was a 
loud thud, and a rattle, the sound of metal 
hitting a wall, and a grizzly splattering, all at 
once.  I ran into the kitchen to find the results 
of a pressure cooker reaching beyond its limits. 
The escape valve had blown and the disk had gone 
hurling out, and imbedded itself in the wall. 
The tripe had been fully cooked and then a nice 
thick layer of it had been sprayed all over the 
walls, the ceiling, the floor, the cabinets, the 
counter, in between all the appliances on the 
counter, all over the stove, the windows, even 
the door knob was well coated.  There was not a 
square inch left clean.  I took a good look at 
all this.  I did not bother getting angry.  What 
would be the point?  Or in wasting energies 
resenting what I had to do now.  I calmly went to 
the stove, turned off the heat, went to the tool 
shed for a ladder, filled a bucket with soapy 
water, got out the rags, the sponges, the mops. 
And I got to work.  It took me four hours.  And I 
cleaned the pressure cooker, too.  Polished it 
until it shone.  Then I went out to dinner.



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net