Chinese Lanterns

She tried to grow them but
they wouldn’t.
She read the cautionary words –

they’ll take over
spread like wildfire
run for your life
poison will be necessary in the end –

but in the end nothing was necessary.
In her garden they refused to grow.
Like other things she feared her craving of,
in the end there was nothing left to crave or fear.

She wanted their papery orange boxes
crowding her empty garden,
filling her autumns with final flames.
She shouldn’t have studied, read up, considered so
carefully her ending-poison options.
She should’ve thrown caution to the spring winds and
bedded them in the richest compost, watered them every day,
not been so meager, afraid to let them know her secret:
I care.  I want you.
Hers is a fearful field, thought they,
and they, in scorn, withered.

If Chops Tick had a Facebook page and decided to join the rest of the Facebook world and write a 25 Random Things About Chops Tick list, this is what that list might look like.

1. I can be made of many materials, including plastic, jade, wood and ceramic.

2. I am sometimes connected by a rubber band or other type of hinge, the better to train small children into using me.

3. The wooden version of me is easiest to use.

4. The plastic version of me – not preferable – often can be found stacked in tall containers on restaurant tables in Taiwan and China.

5. I can be used to retrieve burnt toast from a plugged-in toaster when the owner of said toaster is too lazy to unplug it.

6. I can be used as a bun-holder by longhaired people skilled in bun-making.

7. If necessary, I can be used to poke out your eye.

8. Grown people have been known to toss me onto tables in frustration and demand a “fork instead of these damn sticks.”

9. I do not appreciate being referred to as “damn sticks.”

10. At one time, the jade version of me could be purchased for five yuan at a certain department store in Guangdong.

11. The jade version of me breaks easily, leading jade-version-owners to conclude that I may not be real jade. (What did you expect for five yuan?)

12. Do not run with me. You could poke your eye out (instead of someone else’s, which – again – may be necessary in times of extreme bodily danger).

13. In an emergency, the slender tip of me can be used to plug a tiny hole in a dike.

14. The slightly bigger end of me can be used to plug a slightly larger hole in a dike.

15. Chinese food should only be eaten with me, as it will not taste the way God intended it to taste with a fork, and why would you want to mess with God?

16. I can be placed inside nostrils to simulate walrus tusks.

17. In a pinch, I can be used to clean out an ear, but that is only if you are an ear-cleaning obsessive, and anyway, don’t you know that you should never put anything smaller than a finger into your ear?

18. You can find internet images of “chopstick bras,” a phenomenon not understandable to me.

19. You can use duct tape or super glue to attach hundreds of chopsticks to a long coat and go to a Halloween party dressed as Super Chopstick Coat Person.

20. I can be used as a bookmark if you don’t mind permanent damage to your book, and many of you don’t, which is unfortunate, but a comment on the age in which we live.

21. If you paint a tiny face on me, and then do the same to several others of me, you will have a little Chop Sticks family, and think how much fun you could then have playing Chop Sticks House.

22. If you cave in to  your inherent laziness and put the wooden version of me in a powerful dishwasher, expect that I may emerge bent, warped, or broken.

23. I can be used to stir cream into coffee.

24. Lazy children have been known to use a single stick to stab a dumpling through the middle rather than make the effort to learn how to use chopsticks as nature intended and nimbly pluck said dumpling up.

25. In a pinch, famous orchestra conductors can use me to conduct symphonies.

Once, a Redwing pottery mixing bowl was given to a young woman by an older woman she loved, respected and feared. At first the young woman didn’t much care for the bowl; it was thick, uneven, hairline cracks here and there. This was a long time ago, when the young woman didn’t appreciate thickness and unevenness – Redwing pottery-ness – the way she does now, in her middle age.

But she used the mixing bowl anyway, because she didn’t have many bowls, and she was both a maker of pancakes and a baker of cookies. After a few years the green bowl became her bowl of choice, to the extent that she didn’t enjoy baking nearly as much if the green bowl were dirty or already in use. The green bowl had grown on her, and she realized that she loved its uneven thickness, its heft, its muddled green glaze.

The bowl was used, always, for salads, and the mandarin oranges and toasted sliced almonds of a particular salad – the salad of choice for six or seven years in the ’90’s – were beautiful against its sloped green sides. When the woman had to move suddenly, and then moved again, and then again, the green bowl was transported carefully, wrapped in newspapers, carried by hand.

One day the woman looked at the green bowl and thought, “This will be a bowl that I pass on to one of my daughters.” Not because it had great monetary value, but because it had held so many batches of cookies, so many pancakes and so many salads.  Thousands of times, a wooden spoon had beat against the sides of the green bowl with that soft, soothing wooden sound. The warmth of kitchens, one after another, had always been with the green bowl.

Fifteen years after the bowl was given to the then-young woman, she mixed up a batch of chocolate chip cookies in it. When  the cookies were all baked, she left the bowl on the countertop, to return to it later and wash it. An hour later, a crash was heard from the kitchen, and she went running.

The dog of the house, butter-crazed, had managed to paw the bowl off the counter. The bowl fell to the tile floor and shattered. Shards of green lay under the table, the refrigerator, the oven.

The woman is not much of a crier, even at funerals and hospitals and in the face of heartbreak, her own or that of someone she loves. But the green bowl brought her to her knees. She doubted that her children would remember it at all.

Consider the dumpling, if you will. In all its incarnations – fried, steamed or boiled – it is the food of my dreams. In Taipei, in 1981, you could buy them for a penny apiece – yes, that’s $.01 apiece – and I ate them every day in a dumpling restaurant in Food Alley, where the tables were rickety, the floor was dirt (is that possible? am I just making that up? Honestly, I don’t think so), and each tabletop held a diner creamer filled with dried crushed chilis floating in peanut oil, soy sauce, and – at this particular restaurant – a coveted tiny bottle of sesame oil.

Take a look at that above paragraph. It was my goal to construct every sentence of this entire entry so that it contained a clause suspended in dashes – like this – but already I have grown tired of such a conceit, and if another such sentence appears from here on, it will not be intentional, but will have grown organically from the forest of surrounding words, the way a sunflower will suddenly appear halfway through the summer, just below the bird feeder. That was a very long sentence there, wasn’t it.

So anyway,  the various kinds of dumplings at this particular penny-apiece dumpling restaurant were listed on a blackboard. Since my knowledge of Chinese characters, even back then, when I used to work at them, isn’t good, I didn’t know what half the offerings were. Nor did I care, because what could be better than the tried and true pork+vegetable dumpling? Nothing, in my opinion. Were it not for the pig, I could easily be vegetarian, but the pig exists, and so do pork+vegetable dumplings, and there you have it.

Next week will mark our annual dumpling party in celebration of the Chinese New Year. Two giant bowls of dumpling filling will be prepared, one traditional and one veggie. Stacks of gyoza wrappers – because I’m too damn lazy and unskilled to make them myself – and here we have another dash-dash sentence,  don’t we, a triple dasher –  will stand at the ready. Dumpling eaters of all ages will try their hand at filling them, pinching them shut, curving them into the requisite crescent. The Dumpling Master will stand at the stove, frying and boiling batch after batch.

Chopsticks will be scattered about, as will small dipping bowls containing the hallowed mixture of soy sauce and rice vinegar and garlic and sesame oil.

A couple of pans of brownies will also stand at the ready, because brownies – as everyone knows (and here we go again; these sentences are out of control) – are the traditional dessert of the Han people.

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, the best dumplings can be found at my friend Ping’s house. Barring a visit to Ping’s kitchen, try the Grand Shanghai, on Grand Avenue, six blocks east of Snelling in St. Paul, and the Evergreen Taiwanese Restaurant on Eat Street in Minneapolis. In New York, try Prosperity Dumplings in Chinatown (5/$1.00!). Or if you find yourself near Madison Square Park, try the Rickshaw.

Yum. Duo chi yi dianr.

A Place that Wants Only to Take You

away from everything you know
into everything that was known.
You and your sisters, clutching berry boxes.
Brambles next to the pond, canes yearning over the creek.
Blackberries, thick tapered bodies
like bumble bees, darker than blue.
Work your way down the creek without knowing.
Drift away from this sister and that one.
Find your way into the heart of the patch.
This is where you are – a still summer day.
Your hair red-brown silk,
drifting waistward.
Sweet tang of berries
on your tongue.
Drone of insects.
Beat of sun.
Faraway days.

 

You were driving down the street toward your house when you saw a giant turtle at the crosswalk with a long stick protruding from his shell. For some reason, the sight of a giant turtle struggling to cross the street in the middle of the coldest January you can remember didn’t strike you as strange, although maybe it should have. You thought, “how odd, a giant turtle right there on my street,” and kept driving.

The second you drove past the giant wiggling turtle, you screeched the brakes and crunched to a stop in the middle of what you call a curb snowbank and the city of Minneapolis calls a plowed street. This was not a giant wiggling turtle, it was an old, large man in a dark green nylon parka, and he was fallen down onto his stomach. The long stick? His  cane, extended before him.

“Sir, what’s the best way for me to help you?”

“Up. Help me up.”

“No problem.”

You bent down and got your arms around his chest and lifted. He made it partway up and then lowered down again. He was heavy. It seemed that he had been struggling to get up for some time; he was shaky and he had a slightly panicky look in his eyes.  You remembered the woman you used to live down the street from, who had ripped her back apart trying to lift a patient out of a tub. You realized that you had no idea at all of how to get this man to his feet.

“Okay, this is what we’re going to do, sir. I’m going to lift slowly as you brace yourself on one leg. We’re going to rise together very steadily as you keep putting your weight on that leg. When we’re halfway up, you can put weight on your other leg as well.”

Where the hell did that come from? You know nothing about lifting heavy people off the ice and snow and onto their feet. Good God. And yet the words kept coming out of your mouth, soft and reassuring, as if you were some  kind of expert.

“Are you ready? On the count of three.”

He braced his weight on his left leg while you lifted slowly and steadily. Halfway up, he put weight on his other leg as well. Then he was fully up, and you handed him his walking stick.

“Can I give you a ride home, sir?”

No.

“Shall I walk you across the street?”

Yes.

Across the street you hobbled together, until he was on the other side and making his way down the poorly-shoveled sidewalk. Thank you, miss. You’re welcome, sir. Treacherous walking out here. Horrible winter. Stay warm. And off he went, and into your house you went, to stand by the fire and try to keep yourself upright and steady. For how long?

Here is a 250-year-old house in upstate New York.  Go on in and, if you dare, open the door that leads to the cellar. That’s right, cellar – no basement here. Make your way down the creaking steps, if you dare, and peer into the darkness, but since you probably don’t dare (and I don’t blame you one bit), I’d be happy to tell you what’s down there, or at least what I suspect is down there, since empirical evidence is hard to come by, here at the Homestead.

What’s down there, besides forgotten jars of 100-year-old home-canned bread and butter pickles? A whole bunch of dirt, scraps of wood, mouse skeletons, possibly a human skeleton for all I know, and a furnace. I think, anyway. So far as I know, it’s never been turned on.

That’s because we’re tough, here at the Homestead, and we heat our house with wood. Wood which we (meaning Don the Magnificent) cuts himself, legally (not always the case in upstate New York) from orange-circled trees up on state forest land in the Adirondacks.

Chainsaw the tree – ROAR – to its knees.

Chainsaw it into giant chunks.

Chainsaw it into smaller chunks.

And yet smaller chunks.

Gather ye daughters, while ye may, and, with their help, heave the chunks into  the back of the red pickup.

Head back to the homestead.

Gather ye daughters again, and, ignoring their whines, unload the chunks down by the big barn.

Take your maul and your wedge-thingie and set one of the chunks onto a giant stump and drive the wedge-thingie over and over into each of the the smaller chunks until they split into woodstove-size chunks. With daughters’ help, load up the woodstove-size chunks into the pickup and drive it up the dirt road to the Homestead.

Daughters, unload the chunks onto the porch. Form an assembly line and stack them the way I taught you.

Stack, stack, stack. This is my favorite part.  How I love to stack, and I’m good at stacking, and stack I do until that porch is filled with 6′ stacks of wood, until the small barn is filled with 6′ stacks of wood, until there is enough wood, an amount determined by Don the Magnificent.

Settle back and wait for winter, never a long wait in upstate New York, and then fire up the woodstove. Note, the woodstove, not the woodstoves. One woodstove to heat the entire house, which, being 250 years old, is beautifully insulated and airtight – kidding! – so that one woodstove in the kitchen is more than adequate to keep everyone toasty warm.

But what is this we see? Three daughters and their tiny brother, huddled zombie-like around the woodstove. Crouched, hunched, their hands under their armpits. This is where the furnace comes in, if only because it is never turned on. It could be turned on, or so we conjecture, but it is not. That is because we are upstate New Yorkers, and we are tough. Or at least Don the Magnificent is. The rest of us wouldn’t mind a hit of furnace every once in a while. Even once a month, say, during the winter months, which in upstate New York go from late August to early June.

Just a hint of fossil-fueled warmth? A whisper of petroleum-based relief?

Bwahahaha.

My plan is to build an igloo in my backyard. I will build it according to specifications downloaded from the internet, and I will do an excellent job, so that my igloo is airtight, solidly constructed, and worthy of occupation for the next few months. My igloo will be warm, because that’s what igloos are, aren’t they, according to the laws of physics, or chemistry, or biology, or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? It’s hard to imagine just how an igloo could be warm, but I’ve been told by enough trustworthy people that they are exactly that. Since I am always cold, the warmth of my igloo will come as a relief.

In my igloo I will have a small fire, not for warmth – because igloos are naturally warm – but because fires are pretty, and I love them. There will be no smoke from my fire, but the faint smell of woodsmoke will permeate my clothes, just as it did during my childhood spent in a house heated with wood. You might think that in my igloo I will be wearing many layers of clothes, wool and Goretex and Neosporin, etc., but no. I’ll be wearing a t-shirt and a sweater, my favorite jeans, and my green cotton socks, and I’ll have an unzipped flannel-lined sleeping bag to lie on, because flannel-lined sleeping bags are extraordinarily cozy.

I’ll have music in my igloo. It will drift down from the rounded sides and ceiling of my igloo, and it will be beamed in telepathically, at will, from my own mind. Tom Waits,  Spoon, Yo La Tengo, Chopin, Outkast, the Burt Sugar Trio – anyone I want to hear,  at any given moment, will magically appear. “Appear” is not the right word for telepathically-beamed igloo music, but I can’t seem to think of a better one, and I’m sure you know what I mean.

Food? Of course. Strachiatella soup, baguettes from the long-gone New French Kitchen, Lindt milk chocolate truffles, a Shackburger from the Shake Shack, a small Mediterranean salad from the Chirping Chicken, and mounds of heavily-salted sauteed spinach with garlic. Salt in such large quantities is not good for you, you say? I’m sure you’re right, but this is my igloo, not yours.

I will have visitors in my igloo, and like the wishful music,  anyone I want to see will magically appear, from this world or other worlds unknown to me. Christine Hoffbeck, how lovely to see you again. Did you know that I think of you every morning, and I picture your smiling face and your tiny nose, especially the way it turned red that one time you drank that sip of champagne?

Caroly Bintz, wise and laughing friend of my youth, hello again, and welcome to my igloo, and let us conjure the giant glasses of chocolate milk we used to make every day at lunch when we snuck away from school and across the street to your green ranch house. And let us also conjure the half-inch-thick peanut butter sandwiches on Wonder Bread.

George Kirsch, I greet you with some reserve but also much interest, as, while I did not know you, I often picture you standing in an unknown living room and playing the violin. Please feel free to play the violin, if you wish. Or speak to me of whatever you want.

RJ and Doc and Greg,  I did not expect to see you here in my igloo, but what a happy surprise. And Ellen, and Meredith, and Susie: welcome. Betty Lee, you with your leopard-striped pants and lovely smile, hello, hello. Welcome, and isn’t it astonishing that such a small-appearing igloo can hold us all without feeling even a bit cramped, but there you have it.

Yes, I will build my igloo today. And I will live in it as long as I want. All around me the things that need to be done will be done by people who are not me, while I lie on my flannel-lined sleeping bag eating Original Flavor Bugles one by one and speaking – or not – with those dear to me.

The Perfect Patron. You make lists of books you want to read. You reserve them online. You patiently wait your turn for the new bestsellers and head promptly to the library when your time has come. You check out with a clean conscience using your own card, upon which no fines or warnings have been placed. You read said books within the allotted three-week period and return them before or by the due date. All the librarians like you. I myself don’t like you, but hey, that’s no reflection on you.

The Slightly Imperfect Patron. You occasionally go to the library and check out the books you wish to read. You also occasionally go to the library on behalf of your children in order to check out the books that said children need for the endless, mind-numbing five-paragraph essays that their schools require of them. This (the checking-out-for-your-children) along with the occasional overdue book is what makes you a slightly imperfect patron, because you should always return your books on time and you should also always teach your children that checking out the books for their five-paragraph essays is their responsibility. Librarians still like you, however, and so do I.

The Bad Patron. Even though there are many books that you wish to check out from the library and read, you avoid the library assiduously. And why is that? Because you cannot seem to return any book in a timely manner, meaning within a year or two after the date on which it is due.

This is a lifelong perversion, and despite the guilt and self-recrimination it has caused you lo these many years, you still can’t get it right. When you have to go to the library because no Half-Price Books in the entire metropolitan area has in stock the book you need – or, more accurately, the book your child needs for one of his or her endless, mind-numbing five-paragraph essays – you skulk to one of the many neighborhood libraries that dot your fair city.

With book in hand and eyes cast to the floor, you skulk to the check-out counter and hand over the book. You then try to determine which of the four library cards you carry within your wallet – one for you, one for each child – might be “clean,” as in, has the lowest overdue fine attached to it, and, trying for nonchalance, hand it over.

You are low! You are disgusting! You are the kind of patron who has carried a copy of Cherry Ames: Student Nurse with you for the past thirty years, fully intending to return it to the hometown library of your youth, aren’t you? Vile. Go home right now and hold your hand in a large bowl of ice cubes.

 

In glove compartment:

Miniature hard-plastic snap-open box of baby wipes bought in hopes of maintaining then-new car cleanliness. Small pack of kleenex received as part of complimentary “sniffles” pack given out by former health care provider (hated term #1: “health care provider,” along with hated term #2, “educator”). Insurance card, possibly up to date, possibly not (who can keep track? they come so often, and then must be punched out from their partially-laminated sheet of stiff paper). Son’s road test checklist and fee receipt. Easy-reference flip chart guide to car’s controls provided at time of then-new car sale. Winter emergency brown acrylic beret-like back-up hat to be used in case of sudden blizzard when one might have to hike nine miles to nearest town in white-out conditions with only telephone poles for guidance. Winter emergency black acrylic back-up scarf. Winter emergency pair of 2/$1 Walgreen’s acrylic one size fits all miniature gloves, each with tip of middle finger chewed off by covetous dog. Worn sheet of paper containing “How to Jump-Start Your Car” instructions kindly imparted by former student.

In driver’s side door pocket:  Pair of yellow rubber kitchen gloves placed there after reading that said gloves work wonders in removing dog hair from furniture (theory untested as of yet). Half-full plastic bottle of spring water which freezes each night and partially thaws when car has been driven more than 20 minutes. Crumpled Select-a-Size Viva paper towel kept in car in case of severe nose drip or beverage spill. Seven smooth gray rocks collected from beach on Lake Superior, which rattle each time car is braked or accelerated.

In secret lift-up storage compartment: Half-full can of mistakenly-bought “lightly salted” cashews kept in case of winter emergency hunger, used only as last resort because who wants “lightly” salted when one could have “extremely heavily salted”?

In front passenger side door : Not sure, to be honest. Perhaps crumpled cellophane wrappers. Perhaps wadded up pieces of paper containing ABC gum. Perhaps old railroad tie bolts found by side of railroad track in Bucyrus, North Dakota. Perhaps nothing, although that seems highly unlikely.

On back seat: Royal blue fleece blanket spread over entire seat and wedged between back cushions in mostly fruitless attempt to keep dog hair confined to fleece blanket and not back seat.

In back seat sleeve storage compartment: Empty plastic water bottle left by child passenger. Small winter emergency pad of paper and pen in case last note of love and reassurance needs to be left for loved ones who will be notified by the authorities of frozen body found huddled within small cinnamon-colored car. Tiny empty boxes of Jujy Fruits, Milk Duds and Nerds left over from Halloween and not disposed of by child passenger, who has many good qualities, cleanliness not being one of them.

In trunk:  One 50-pound bag of “grit” and three 50-pound bags of sand, bought from Bryant Hardware in (utterly vain) attempt to make car perform better – or, rather, perform at all – when faced with ice or snow in any amount, serving as impetus for winter emergency preparations. One 15-pound bag of Solid Gold Lamb and Rice dog food. One half-full box of Peanut Butter Madness! Dog Biscuits in shape of happy capering gingerbread boy-like creature. Royal-blue plastic dog double food+water combo travel bowl. One-third full bottle of blue windshield wiper juice. Three dog-mauled tennis balls. Three bungee cords in blue, green and orange. TwoThule tie-downs. Extra light green fleece dog blanket which could also be used in case of emergency, as when traversing North Dakota in a blizzard and forced to pull over by side of road with only dogs and fleece dog blankets for warmth and lightly-salted cashews for sustenance, followed by Peanut Butter Madness! Dog Biscuits in case lightly-salted cashews run out. Travel Scrabble in case of emergency need for entertainment. Miniature, barely-adequate scraper which will not be replaced because of the known existence – even if currently unfindable – of expensive, ergonomically correct, expandable scraper/brush combo in attractive shade of royal blue. Large plastic bag which once contained dozens and dozens of unopened,  now opened and emptied, tiny Halloween-size boxes of Jujy Fruits, Nerds, and Milk Duds, continually pilfered over months by candy-mad child despite constant stern warnings by mother to Stop. Stealing. That. Candy.