If It Hadn't Been for the Potato Famine

If it hadn't been for the potato famine I sure as hell wouldn't be here writing these lines, wherever they're leading, nor would my brother and sister be living their good lives in California and Florida, respectively, may their lives be full of joy, though if not for the Great Hunger that would be moot, would it not. In the current but limited understanding of the meaning of it all, nothing wonderful can happen to you if you haven't been born.

My mother and father, too, would not have been my parents without the potato famine, or even parents at all, if they themselves had not been been born from non-great grandparents who hadn't been birthable either, because their would-have-been parents, suddenly not suffering extreme starvation, thanks to complete faminelessness, were instead living good history in the bliss of a bounteous mid-19th century Ireland, prospering on a healthy diet - including potatoes - and having well-fed Irish families whose respective sons and daughters never met by chance in a tragic diaspora.

Centuries later, from the auld sod to a mountainside in Japan of all places - where as the traveler in the family I finally settled down - I think often of the sacrifice of those families back then who, after heart-rivening consideration, scraped hunger into pence and then into pounds to send off in steerage the healthiest, best-suited young family member, whom they would see nevermore but who might survive, sailing away beyond a life's horizon to the lowest rung of NYC, who then lived far enough along time's thread to meet and pass these genes down the unbroken line from all those folks who had gone before, whom I'll never know, though now and then I glimpse them in the mirror.

PUMPKINS IN AMERICA: THE MYSTERY

The other day I was enjoying a bit of pumpkin at lunch - Echo makes a nice dish of plain steamed pumpkin cubes with various additions that go great with just about anything-- tasty, sweet, rich in all sorts of noots, long shelf-life etc. While savoring the experience, I got to thinking for about the 9,463rd time why Americans don't eat pumpkins straight as a vegetable, over there in the land of 600lb pumpkins they don't know what to do with other than carve into jack-o-lanterns in the autumn of every year or have biggest-pumpkin-in-the-county contests for the gourd that symbolizes Thanksgiving. Which is admirable enough, but why isn't the pumpkin used as food? Why are pumpkins so looked down upon in America? That splendid squash, standing proud and golden right next to the turkey, symbolizing Thanksgiving for plenty in difficult times! What has happened to that rep ever since?

They do put some pumpkin in cans, to use later for pies at other times of the year, when folks want pumpkin pie, if there really are any such times, but just go and look in any US cookbook for some pumpkin recipes and that’s basically it: pumpkin pie and pumpkin puree, muffins, bread, cookies, which like the few other recipes are basically a way of disguising pumpkins.

Even when I stayed with my frugal aunt and uncle on their country farm where they grew and ate turnips, parsnips, squashes, beets, pumpkins too, even ate turnip greens and rutabagas, but never pumpkin, other than as pie. Strange, no? All that food just tossed... to the pigs of course. Pigs love pumpkins, supreme truffle-finding gourmets that they are.

Here in Japan there is no Thanksgiving day, which is nice because this way we get to eat pumpkin whenever we want, since it's grown all the time because folks here love pumpkin as a food and do not look down upon it as some cultures do without knowing why.

In Japan the main food pumpkin, comparatively less eye-appealing than the shunned US variety, is a smallish, green, rough-skinned pumpkin that is golden inside, much like the US pumpkin, sweet and soft like any squash when cooked, and I would guess somewhat the same texture and flavor, but there my comparison must go hungry, because I realize that never in the American portion of my life have I eaten any steamed pumpkin!

Why should this be? When I first came to Japan back in the early seventies and looked for brown rice, folks were aghast at the idea. Back in feudal Japan, when only aristocrats could afford white rice, and commoners had to eat brown rice, white rice became a status symbol, and so it remained even centuries later, even though brown rice was tastier and more nutritious. Does the US pumpkin historically have a white rice equivalent?

It is a mystery.

LIFE TO THE DAY

This late September afternoon and evening I'm out running around with one arm plus, sectioning, sorting and stacking a mountain of firewood we got from some landscaper guys who were scaping the grounds of a house for sale down the mountain, we asked if they could bring the firewoody results to our house (they're glad to, rather than drive several loads of wood all the way to a landfill or incinerator), so they dumped logs and long branches of ironwood, oak, beech, locust and black pine in front of the deck on Thursday night, and twice more today.

It always surprises me how heavy ironwood is, just a 30 cm diameter yard-long chunk makes you take an extra breath and then lift again for real-- I'm being careful with the one arm plus, though one could get carried away at the sight of so much free heat to put in the bank, but I have my limits and I listen for them, the arm whispers to me in the edgy lingo of early pain, then I stop.

But I got a lot done today nevertheless, also started another of my patented Brady Cedar-tree firewood holders - have those tall, green sophisticated presences do something more than look beautiful, put those strong slim bodies to work, get some muscle on those grainy bones, thereby freeing up our metal firewood holder for winter use on the deck, which was part of the plan -

In the midst of all these hitherings amidst the rough bark and grain, through the grays and browns and fading greens and crisping leaves, with the right-on-time blossoms of higanbana rising straight up, standing around like squads of cardinals watching a priest do all the work, I couldn't help but notice the extreme oddness of a big beautiful delicate yellow summer flower coming up from the nowhere of tall unkempt grass that's always by the garden faucet, no place for such a flower, out of time too, for when I looked closer with an armful of ironwood I saw that it was a melon flower, a golden mist of a blossom grown from a seed dropped some time during the summer when I was washing the kitchen sink garbage strainer (after dumping the contents on the compost pile over by the cherry tree).

And so an opportune packet of life took advantage of the household situation to show the immediate world what a melon seed can do on its own amidst hard labor and punctilious bloomings, and what a beauty it was, all the more precious for being so out of place and time: a summer melon blossoming in Autumn, a flowery martyrdom up here on the mountain, quiet little facet of the mystery, offering its bright life on the fading day...

THE WISHES OF HEAVEN

When there's a slow steady snow falling in large flakes through the cold still air and a full day-and-night supply of prime dried firewood stacked next to the stove, which is glowing gold with a well-stocked flame of oak and cherry and there's no point in shoveling off the deck anyway until the snow stops, and besides you've just had a big lunch of hot three-bean soup with toasted baguette and that mystery you put the bookmark in the day before yesterday is right at the point that makes a mystery worth reading - plus it takes place in winter - you'd have to be some kind of insane to wash the dishes, let alone do laundry right now, and thus fly in the face of the almighty, for there is no opposing the vectors, the many powerful vectors that point like the finger of god to the celestial aspects of arranging a few cushions in front of the stove and fulfilling the wishes of heaven, is there.

THE MYSTERY OF RAYMOND CHANDLER

Recently, it seems that nearly every review I read about Raymond Chandler contains a crypto-apologia for Chandler's continuing appeal. What is the reason, they don't exactly ask: it couldn't be the plots, not even the prose, as unique as it is; he was a hack, is the implication, he's a mystery they can't stop talking about.

But all true art is mystery, won't let you put your finger on it, take its pulse, declare it dead, send it to the morgue. The critics would love to do that with Chandler, escape the low-life, hard-boiled paradox and return to the hard-wired academic safety of Faulkner, James, Melville, Hawthorne et al., the 'legitimate' American canon (wherever he is, Chandler chortles up his sleeve).

I have read many times practically every story Chandler ever wrote; for decades I have been Marlowe's silent sidekick as we traveled those dim noir corridors, those scented forests, those starlit lakesides and sunburned streets, those twisting mountain roads and empty cabins among the evergreens, and I still want to go there again.

Chandler's books are spells that spin gold from the mundane and pour it into your lap: the lobby of the perfume corporation, the foyer of the magnate's mansion, the stairway to the gin joint above the street, the kitchen of the empty cabin out by the lake, before the screen door on the booze-loving woman's front porch, the long stairway from the beach to the house of the seeker of the jade necklace, the darkness of night roads, the carpeted stairs leading down to silence in the deathly empty house up in the hills, the boat from the pier to the floating casino-- each of these image-moments is etched into the reader's mind because he has been there, back then, times past, with Marlowe.

This is the magic of Chandler, plain and unprecedented, with quirks in his words and tricks in his moods that can't and won't be found in any other American writer: not Hammet, not MacDonald, not Spillane, not Leonard, not Ellroy, not even Burke. The only other writer who can claim anything like this mystery-magic is Conan Doyle, for whom the mystery is the key, with the special ambience of Victorian London.

But Chandler will always have pre-war southern California. What he gives us in our own time is more than another time, another place; he gives us a gift that transcends plot and whodunnit parameters, he gives us the adventure we are on, Marlowe and I: we are alone as ever a human can be on scorching afternoons in that shabby, seldom-visited office (with the bottle of rye in the desk), until the knockout blonde comes in and lights up. We are still and always alone in those places the soul knows well, where the unexpected must always be expected, through long stretched-out moments in the tautness of light slanting toward dusk, casting sinister shadows over landscapes of treachery and danger on the edge of unspoken despair, in silences scented with gin and gunpowder, rye and pine resin, car exhaust, ocean air, linoleum and old carpet, sounded with the creak of wood, lit in sunbeams filled with motes of dust or following the quest of headlights swerving up mountain roads deep into evergreens, where secrets will be revealed that have nothing to do with such unrealities as plot and story, but everything to do with why hearts beat, hands tremble and sweat, minds puzzle, eyes turn and look back, bodies seek rest, and fall at last.

Alone in the silent heat-wave air of the naked sun out by the mountain lake, break into one of the empty cabins and look around. Open a kitchen cabinet, take down the box of flour and pour it out, find what has been hidden there with all its unspoken realizations, move alone in the same searing silence out to the lakeshore and onto the dock, happen to look down from the sizzling air into the cool, shimmering watery depths so like your very own: run back to shore, find a big stone, lug it out onto the dock and heave it into the rocking calm of the water to bring up, in the bubbling and hissing roil, whatever is down there; follow where it points…

You are in the thrall of Chandler, and are grateful...unless you're one of the canon flunkies, mystified by the guy's immortal popularity.