Recipes for Trouble

It’s funny what stands out when you’re traveling. You plan a great meal and it’s the walk to the restaurant you remember. You see great art but somebody’s poetry muttered on a street corner is what touches your soul.

Pleasant and pretty (free coffee and biscotti! Free box lunches and wine on the flight!) Porter Airlines brings me gently into Newark; trains and subway slide me into Manhattan. I walk two blocks to catch the Q Train, asking directions along the way. A middle-aged white dude walks me there. In that short time I find out he’s a former pro skateboarder and he prefers “my” sport, hockey, to “his”, baseball. At one point he gestures grandly ahead and says with awe: The. Empire. State. Building.I follow his gaze and there it is, looming above 33rd Street, self-important, retro.

I’m in New York, visiting my niece The Redheaded Busker. She needs some lovin’ up after an illness in December and a grisly encounter with American healthcare. She’s a little skinnier than I like to see her, grey shadows under her eyes. But still with the dazzling smile.

I dump my stuff at her Brooklyn apartment and then we’re off, back into the subways. As we sit on an outdoor bench waiting for the Q Train she points at the tracks flanked by graffitti and crumbling brick and says, I. Love. This. In the summer it’s full off birds.

That day I see a video installation by Omer Fast at The Whitney Museum that plays hard and fast with the protocols of racism, as well as work from Biennials past, glowing iconic pieces by Jasper Johns, Matthew Barney, Barbra Kruger. The Whitney has and continue to be, my alternative art school, a place that has always taken on gender and race by showcasing artists who dare confront taboos.

We walk streets lined with haute fashion and haute art, eat salmon ceviche, talk. It’s all wonderful. But what stands out from that day is a shoe repair shop deep in the bowels of Lexington & 63rd subway, where The Redhead Busker stows her amp between performances. I go with her to pick it up and am proudly introduced as her aunt (full disclosure: we’re not blood relations but I’ve know her most of her life). I shake hands all round, am warmly welcomed to New York.

While I’m waiting for The Busker as she meets and greets, I decide to have a shoeshine. I climb up into the tall chair and a young Latino man spends ten minutes buffing and polishing, putting his heart and soul into it. By the time he’s done my dull brown boots look like patent leather. He smiles shyly but firmly refuses my money, and The Busker tells me not to force the issue: It’s. A. Gift. Because. You’re. My. Aunt. she says.

Later, as we head home I say to her: I. Feel. Like. We. Scammed. Them. I mean, we’re. not really related. The Busker looks genuinely puzzled. She scans my face to see if I really mean it.

But. Marus. she says emphatically It. Wasn’t. A. Scam. We. Are. Family.

This week I wondered, what are you supposed to do with this feeling art can give you? What if it follows you, to the office, to the classroom? What if it exceeds the space of a page, or a room?

I read a novel this week, A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, that exceeded its rectangular papery space each time I picked it up.

“Regret - operatic, oceanic, fathomless - seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, lightlessly and lifelong…”

This book made me want to write, made me thirst for the river of words that could, if there was time for it, come out of my pen.

I went to an art gallery this week, for the first time in months, saw a show of Micheal Snow’s recent work. One piece, “Condensation - A Love Story” was a projection of a kind of time-lapse of weather in a Nova Scotian cove. Sun flew across field and ocean and then receded into a curtain of fog and rain; light remerged, and revealed the cliffs to have different colours before rain shrouded them again. I felt moved by a natural world so enduring and fine.

I saw a Play, Cloud 9, by Caryl Churchill, that failed to move me despite enormous resources and a cast of highly experienced and talented actors. I saw a one-woman show, Everything I’ve Got by my friend Jess Dobkin, and got to enter into a magical world of unicorns, vaginas, clown cars, and lavish artistic imagining.

Seen any good or bad art lately? How did it make you feel?

Days in the city have been marked by pale, blank skies, temperate weather and a damp chill. A new semester begins, and the hallways of my workplace are feverish with students. No marking yet, so there are tiny bits of time to cook, or read a novel, between writing and festival submissions and the day-to-day admin of a part-time artist’s life.

There is good food in this city, and people to share it with. Izakaya (Japanese tapas) at the freshly-minted Guu on a chilly night with The Librarian. A room full of noise (the wait staff shout greetings and orders in unison), and eager smiling people at long wooden tables. We adore the BC tuna sashimi, the grilled black cod with miso and white wine sauce, and the grilled oysters with spinach, garlic mayonnaise and cheese. A few days later, hole-in-the-wall Mexican with The Tennis Player: pozole soup, enchiladas with mole sauce, and a colourful melange of Christmas and Mexican decorations.

And a tuna salad sandwich, shared with The Queer Organizer as we take a pause from skiiing in the hills near Mansfield, in the fresh, astringent air, is as delicious as anything I’ve eaten all week.

I’ve been making salads, too. A Waldorf-ish quinoa-apple salad; retro mushroom and spinach; a beet-fennel-carrot slaw. I cook wholesomely and earnestly, in this first month of a new decade: sweet potato and chickpea curry; pasta puttanesca. Tomorrow I will make minestrone soup, and later go to an Indian Harvest Dinner for which the Diasporic Filmmaker has requested perogies. I will walk through Trinity-Bellwoods Park to the Czech deli on Queen Street to purchase them, and then I’ll fry them up with onions and serve them with sour cream.

A good week of food and friends, in a troubled world.

The hospital’s on a barren, windswept city corner, abrupt, austere, final.

The entrance is bare bones. It greets you uncertainly: there’s no reception, just someone behind glass who quickly turns away from you when you arrive, and buzzes you in. Nowhere to ask anything, not that you know what to ask. Not even a gift shop to soften the transition from the world of the living to the world of the ill and dying.

She looks oddly beautiful, even though she’s lost weight, even though she is ninety-four and about to commence, as a someone once described it, her ‘last immigration.’

She is the last of a generation, the generation that came here on wagon carts and ships and trains, wearing numbers, or sheepskin coats, boxy suits, fedoras, or tattoos. She is the last of our archive, not that any of them ever told us much beyond how terrible it was there and how bad it was here. Much of her story will die with her. And by story I also mean recipes: her torte, her perogy dough, her mushroom sauce.

We thought there was more time, to ask the questions, to write the answers and recipes down.

We sit and talk, the daughter and I. She sleeps, mostly, her mouth open. She sleeps more and more, the daughter says. The daughter is here every day, all day. When the mother awakes, the daughter leans over her and they exchange radiant smiles. The daughter is already heartbroken, I can see this.

I am introduced, a relation, or, an intruder from an alien planet, the planet of the healthy and the living. She strains toward me, and she kisses me on the cheek. Somehow, she knows I am family and she knows to kiss me goodbye.

Back on the street, on the corner of Church and Bloor, I gasp for air, over and over and over. I will take the subway home. I will make pasta for dinner. I will watch TV, hours of it.

The next day, I will visit a friend and her new baby. The baby sleeps more and more, says the new mom. When the baby awakes, it makes eye contact, appraises me steadily, its mouth a tiny, delicate O.