May (The Chef) Part 1

5.31.24

What is a chef? I watched them for years in the restaurants I worked for then the restaurants I owned. Along the way it was suggested to me to become one. A recommendation offered after one of many dinners cooked for friends and family with ease. Maybe I’d prepared lobster bisque in Maine flambéed in Calvados. A showy affair. Maybe I’d prepared crab pasta in Maryland with handmade tajarin. I’ve enjoyed making this Piedmontese thin and long pasta. I was born and raised in the Piedmont though these American foothills of the Appalachian Mountains have little in common with the place where the region took its name. There is no Barolo wine from up on the hills or down in the holler. And I only learned the identity of my birthplace long after my identity had been established. Telling the suburbanites in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area of their Piedmont identity borders on fiction. Much the same way many Marylanders are left aghast and appalled at any notion or suggestion that they may be a part of the American South. Those Marylanders are vehemently Yankee. Shallow liberals educated in private schools who hold idealistic views possible only in their realities. Black and white wrong and right incapable of seeing the ocean of grey and hearing the generations of Time through the richness of dripping drawl. Because when one speaks of the American Piedmont—the few who do—they are usually referring to someplace south of Richmond. Though the Piedmont stretches up through Washington and Baltimore and Philadelphia and doesn’t stop until it hits New York. At its southwestern side it runs clear into Alabama. And I realized that Place in the America I’m from means progressive politics and not the land. As if there was no land. They never felt the rolling hills they undulate over in their automobiles going to and from PetSmart and McDonalds and school and work and doctors’ visits and soccer training and cheerleading practice no no and neither did I. Annual crossing of the big Bay Bridge for vacation on the shore and it’s so flat over here they say having traveled over from the Piedmont and into the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Did they teach us this in school? I suppose though I don’t recall. Their attention was given to keeping silence in the hall. And it hit me like a ton of bricks: politics isn’t place. The desire to separate oneself from this country’s tragic past (though going back long enough, who among us hasn’t descended from both slave and slaveholder?) has us reaching for progressivism. Yet our progressivism is mired in the same thinking of our ancestors: politics not place. Youth and indignancy combine to make a forceful river. And it’s so easily channeled through the turbines of populism. Our mighty thoughts are usurped.

     I began writing when I learned how to turn letters into words. The nasty women in grammar school had given me the gift of form. I’ve always responded well to assertive leadership. But they confused that with authority and it became water to this magic seed. The Artist was born. If I don’t write my story then I allow it to be gobbled up by the dam. So I write bridges over it instead that cross that split in the fabric of thought.

     And I study ART because expression keeps me from falling in. And so Basquiat’s Irony of a Negro Policeman becomes a note and Picasso’s Guernica is a chord and I write my bridge. But as I formed my business I was pulled into the current and my words came to the edge and I thrashed and raged. And that rage fused with art and from it my knife was forged. I made lobster bisque in Maine because it felt like the right thing to do. I made crab pasta on Maryland’s Eastern Shore because it felt like the right thing to do. I made Boova Shenkels and Cumberland hotlinks in my restaurant in the northern Piedmont nestled next to the Catoctin Mountains because it felt like the right thing to do. The bridge must be built the story must be told and the result of preparing a dish of food is as arbitrary as the painting hanging on a rich man’s foyer wall. I want to say that words cannot represent all but what I know is that reasons don’t represent all. And words are often mistaken for reasons. For answers to questions. For beliefs. Words and paint and food and statues of stone and sculptures of clay… artists do not fight with reasons they build bridges with their songs. Storytellers. I did not choose to become a chef any more than I chose to become a writer. I don’t love food. I AM FOOD. I don’t love writing. I AM THOUGHT. Our progress is a supernova. And I shield my eyes from the blinding fragments of exploding light. And I see a blackhole. Ripped through the canvas of place this hole is swallowing our time. Rank with the decay of power. Rancid with godlessness. Until our time vanishes into nothingness. So I turned away from progress and back to the land. I traded politics for shovel. To quarry Time for new thoughts. And so in sweat he prepares himself to receive them. Fasting and exercise and reading. To take control of what can be controlled. To free himself from what cannot. And he moves fast very fast. Fearful. As if his world orbits a blackhole. Because his world does orbit a blackhole. And as the first light spreads over the field of shin-high corn he walked through it guided above by not sun but clear and sharp and white moon. Toward the pulling dark hole in yonder trees. And he entered it into the humid air. Rainwater resurrecting. And he knelt and picked a wild strawberry and ate and it was waterlogged like a wet sponge and through the trees and back into field he walked over burnt rye poisoned with the product of human thought poisoned with the violence of human thought poisoned with false sovereignty and the forest again absorbed him as the sound of rough waters echoed off trees

Creation quaked voices—

It was a cortège

Of mourning and lament

Crow could hear and he looked around fearfully*

And a path received him and he arrived at a lookout carpeted in soft and lush green grass born from the orange clay cliff bashed and bashed and bashed by bay Time until the waters take it back bit by bit by bit by bit and there’s his friend’s land over the creek yes yes there that peninsula jutting out into the Sassafras with the pound nets set on poles stuck into offshore silty floor. And he descends through thick air through invasive blooming Silverberries once planted for erosion control but yes yes now look what man has done trying to control nature trying to save her? (only man is small enough to possess ego so big) the silverberries have choked the native trees. But in consolation its flowers and sweet berries please birds and bees. And he steps over thorny brambles and fallen waterlogged trees onto shiny shimmering sand the tide is low and the beach is open and he walks down it for a while and it is a long while and he cannot believe that he has all this shore to walk down to follow the river to dream alone and dream and dream and dream over the rough river waters merging into roaring salty white-capped bay. A Homer painting. And up the cliffs ascending back into deep brush looking far out over wide water where John Smith sailed and peered into this very forest above cliffs of orange clay he feels ghosts among him. And in the dark forest sunlight begins to dapple the path. Warming. And back in the clearing of rye a deer leg. Fresh and wet. The black hoof and light brown hair shiny below gnawed protruding bone.

The swift‘s body fled past

Pulsating

With insects

And their anguish, all it had eaten.*

And the poisoned cereal golden beneath morning sun shimmering with whimsy breeze it doesn’t know it is an agent of power and death. Like him. Like you. And neither does he nor you.

Even man he was a walking

Abattoir

Of innocents—

His brain incinerating their outcry.*

And he returns over his footsteps the moon still impossibly above him. Him small below and reaching reaching reaching up up up like a baby in his crib toward universe dangling mobile moon.

Crow thought ‘Alas

Alas ought I

To stop eating

And try to become the light?‘

But his eye saw a grub. And his head, trapsprung, stabbed.

And he listened

And he heard

Weeping

Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed

Weeping

Weeping

Weeping he walked and stabbed

Thus came the eye‘s

roundness

the ear‘s

deafness.*

*Ted Hughes (Crow’s Tyrannosaurus)