Recipes for Trouble

What do you do if you’re a foodie and you travel to a country where food is…the least of it, really?

(Can you say American Embargo?)

You drink a lot of mojitos. You discover other other pleasures. And you learn to love pork, chicken, and arroz con frijoles.

Last week I traveled to the beautiful, long-suffering, charming and cryptic country of Cuba. I went with my 82-year-old mother. We’d been planning this trip for a year (it got cancelled a year ago, due to my broken wrist). We wept when we encountered each other in the tiny Juan Gonzalez airport in Veradero. She looked so frail and so ladylike in her white pantsuit and perfectly set white hair.

On the road to the hotel we passed hard-scrabble villages with pink and yellow cinderblock houses and clothelines flapping in the breeze. We drove along the edge of ocean, with plumes of white froth rising against rocky shores.

A rather sardonic “tour guide” told us where to get the best cigars and rum, what Cubans make per month ($20-$30), and the problems created by the double currency - one for tourists (Convertible Pesos) and one for Cubans (Cuban Pesos), which created a class society in a country committed to socialism. In Cuba he told us, everyone, professionals and non-professionals, make the same wage.

He took a pause, and then said to us, Many of the waiters and maids you will see at your hotel are lawyers, teachers, economists. They can make more with tips from convertible pesos than they ever will in their professional jobs. I. Myself. Am. A. Professor. Of. Linguistics. he said. Don’t. Forget. To. Tip. As. You. Leave. The. Bus.

The hotel, a rambling compound of pastel-coloured three-story condo-like buildings, was filled with Canadian tourists strolling about in shorts, sarongs, and sundresses. We could hear Newfoundland accents, Quebecois joual, and the broad vowels of prairie speech. There was a slight mocking tone to their voices; I could overhear them complaining about the food in the buffet, or laughing at the outdated cars.

I was slightly in shock. The warm Caribbean air caressed my skin. I yearned to put on my sundress. I’d never done anything like this before. For an artist/academic like me, a vacation means getting funding to go to a conference or film festival in Vancouver, or London Ontario, or Berlin, and then nervously taking a couple of days off after presenting a paper or screening a film. Academics and artists work pretty much all the time. We don’t know how to do vacation. Apprehensive, I fingered the article on affect theory I had stowed in my purse.

Where were we? Canada? Cuba? Manitoba?

Heads spinning, we immediately went to the bar and ordered mojitos.

[More on food, Cuba and vacations in the next post...]

Mojito recipe
(serves one)

1.25 oz white rum
10-12 mint leaves
1 tbsp sugar
0.5 oz lime juice
2 oz soda water
splash angostura bitters (optional)

Place mint leaves in bottom of glass. Add crushed ice, rum, sugar, and lime juice, and muddle. Add soda water and garnish with mint leaves. Splash bitters over top.

Pierced Valentine

right through its smug candied heart

with sardonically epigrammed cupcakes*

for my beloved writers’ group

(a toughened collection of hearts and minds

if there ever was one)

Valentines Day is for friends

and fellow-writers

and tough hearts

and beautiful minds.

* cupcakes are from Wanda’s Pie In the Sky

It was the wee hours of the morning. The Librarian and I strolled through a snowy Riverdale street after a party. We’d goaded each other on (I’ll. Go. If. You. Go.). We both had winter cabin fever (We’ll. Just. Go. For. An. Hour). We each needed to put on some nice clothes, and feel the flickering warmth of people coming together on a freezing cold night.

The party had been sweet, welcoming, even intimate. Another woman, I’ll call her Gerda, was walking with us. We were on the way to the streetcar stop, making smalltalk, companionably, sleepily, in the temporary solidarity of those who have seen a party through to its end. The weather had warmed up, subtly, and for once the wintry air felt refreshing.

Gerda was telling us that she’d moved here from Berlin, for a relationship. It had just ended, a month after she’d arrived. It’s. Been. Hard. she said, with a small, tender break in her voice. And then, more forcefully. But. I. Want. To. Stay. Here. It. Feels. Right.

You have a lot of friends here said The Librarian with her particular mix of innocence and insight. You’ll. Be. OK.

Here. said Gerda suddenly. Have some cunt chocolate. She pulled two small German chocolate bars out of her pocket. Moser, she said, with quiet amusement. It actually means cunt.

I ate the smooth, silky milk chocolate as my streetcar chugged across the dingier parts of Gerrard Street and a light snow began to fall. I was moved by this stranger’s small, generous, sexy gesture. (Gerda and The Librarian hopped a cab in another direction. The Librarian told me Gerda cried all the way home).

Cathexis, decathexis.

Attaching and then detaching. Reaching out when you want to pull in. Tasting the sweetness of life, after a bitter experience. Connecting. It’s not an easy thing to do.

How do you heal a broken heart? With loving gestures? A ritual? The slow passage of time? And what if all the things that pleasured you - trips to the indoor farmer’s market, cooking together or for each other, the Saturday paper, gin & tonics, walks in a park - are dry, shrunken, bleached of colour, because you found out they were even lovelier when you did them with her?

A few days later, the librarian taught me a new word. Methexis. Perhaps it is a place between cathexis (attachment to a single object of desire) and its opposite, decathexis.

Methexis. I have found various definitions. Group sharing. The opportunity to participate. Refracting the past. Its opposite is chorismos, or separation. Methexis can be achieved through artistic creation, or through performance. Something that is shared with others; a working through, with witnesses.

Another story. The Pastry Chef has been making Valentines cookies, thousands of them, with tiny sentences in pink icing. She put out a call for more pithy phrases on her blog, and several people wrote in. One of them offered the following words:

Unbreak my heart

Dear January,

You took me by surprise, I’ll give you that.

You gave my life a good shake and tossed me onto your frozen shores. I’ll make a list of just a few of the major and minor events of the last thirty days…

Relationship turmoil. A wonderful middle-aged woman I know in the final stages of cancer. A blackout. Temperatures in the minus thirties. 1330 Palestinians killed in Gaza. A new Harper (right-wing prime minister of Canada) budget that, among other things, does not address the fact that half of Canadians are not eligible for unemployment insurance. The legislation of exploited contract faculty back to work after two and half bitterly cold months on the line.

I could go on. But you get the point.

Making a list gives some perspective. Life’s smallish pecadillos juxtaposed against disease, local injustice and international atrocity.

And not to get all Buddhist on you, January, but I’m thinking perhaps some of this brings knowledge and growth. People aren’t fooled by the news anymore (my students certainly aren’t). I think there is more awareness of the Palestinian situation than ever before. I think Obama, neo-liberal though he is, has a slightly different, more informed take on Palestine than whats-his-name before him. I think, since the coalition debacle, that Canadians get that Harper is a power-hungry despot. I’m not sure people get the festering problem of sweatshop universities but we’ll keep working on that one.

The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us at this very instant. (Pema Chodron).

Turmoil, the shadows cast by disease and disability: if nothing else it can bring about openness, sow compassion. Or it can make you into a curmudgeon. Is there a choice?

All of that bad news makes me appreciate the small but significant.

The luminance of friends and their everyday wisdom. Students with limber minds, and their occasionally daring feats of intellectual acrobatics. A lovely impromptu dinner with academic colleagues. The slow, detailed, graceful work of revising a book manuscript. The late afternoon light, stretching itself gingerly into the darkness. The brilliant sun of an eastern Canadian winter.

Hello February.