Stories

“With all that great food in Italy, how do you guys stay so thin?”

This kind question came during a book talk we gave last Monday night in Holbrook, New York – at the Sachem Public Library. It was very generous of the questioner to include me in the “thin” category along with Jill, but indeed I still wear the same suit size I did back in our L.A. Law days twenty-some years ago. I’m not thin, but at least I’m not any fatter than I was then.

We answered her by pointing that Italians don’t eat much processed food and that makes it much easier to keep our weight down over there. But of course it’s not just what they eat that allows them to maintain una bella figura, it’s also how much they eat – or how little, I should say. Italians don’t pile it on like we tend to do over here. A bowl of pasta is not intended to fill you; it’s to prepare your mouth and stomach for your second course.

This truth was driven home dramatically a little later in the evening.

Vintage tales of hardship and survival:
Grandad crushed when the tractor toppled
On Brier Hill. How Uncle John lost his arm
To the picker. Samuel smothered
In the silo, lungs full of harvest.

Thus reads a stanza of the poem Farming – One of the most dangerous occupations. It is representative of the twenty-six poems in Dead Horses, poems of struggle and suffering, loss and death. These are poems of memories, especially memories of horses:

Now that they are dead or gone, the dream
Is always of a field where horses
Flash past, hooves catching and echoing light,
The grass lush, milkweed or Queen Anne’s lace
Along the fencerows. Then suddenly it’s winter,
Snow is falling, shapes are haloed, the sky is bleak.

And another stanza, from the same poem:

…..You want them now, those horses
Crashing the earth with sound as if light
Had been surpassed by speed, as if the laces
That bind you to your bones gave way to winter’s
Blast…..

A few lines in a recent “Quick Takes” column at Inside Higher Ed were enough to make me put down the faux-croissant I’d just purchased at my school’s café and seek out the full story in The Boston Globe: the most popular class at Harvard right now is “Science of the Physical Universe 27.”

It has another name as well—“Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science”—and it “uses the culinary arts as a way to explore phases of matter, electrostatics, and other scientific concepts” (Devra First, “Harvard Uses Top Chefs to Spice Up Science,” Nov. 2, 2010). One interesting fact about this course is that it isn’t your mother’s or your home ec class: it has a guest list of top chefs. Another interesting fact is that 700 students tried to sign up for the fall semester’s offering.

Seven hundred! That’s the total enrollment at some small formerly-known-as-liberal-arts-colleges. I began to think about the potential here: Why stop at physics? Why not use food to teach film and literature? Perhaps this is just what the flailing liberal arts need.

As the world becomes shortage and space obsessed, I realize how ahead of the curve I've been in making myriad reuses of everything and everyone. Call me frugal/economical and/or exploitive/anal.

I reuse big tissue boxes as snowshoes for a friend's kids (kids become two-pronged sources of love and laughs, lumbering around like "transformer bots"); I use their abandoned toy cars as conveyances for salt and pepper shakers glued on top, as "pass the salt" makes the dining room table a speedway.