Conical Pachyderm Stools

Spotify will just keep rolling along, won’t it?  I entered a live Cedar Walton thing on there last night some algorithm has decided to insert what it sees fit to complement that decisioin now, ad infinitum.  Appropriately, I suppose, everything chosen has the piano prominently profiled out front.  Everything seems to be from within a certain decade.  Turn it down and turn in back up later and only reluctantly submit to what it wants to play for me. 

My wife called at five, leaving from downtown, back home.  The call hung, unanswered.  “So what about dinner?”  I made dinner last night.  Haven’t thought about it all day.  “I suppose I’d like you to do it tonight.” I sighed. “Alright.  I’ll order out” was her reply. 

And with that I left the concept.  I didn’t want to cook three nights in a row.  You do it tonight.  It strikes you how dreadful it must have been for the housewives of the fifties, sixties, seventies who never had to worry about food, which is a better lot arguably, (certainly?) than the people of the thirties who may not have had food at all, but had to make something creative and different every night, like serving out a sentence in Purgatory.  “Tonight we’ll try Hamburger Helper.”  “Tonight a TV Dinner.”  I wouldn't want to have to stare it down, uninterrupted, forever. 

The kids came home about thirty minutes after my call.  “What’s for dinner?”  “Ask mom.  She’s ordering.”  “I just called her.  She’s asking what we want.”  An anger bubble dislodges itself from my heart and makes its way to the surface.  She hasn’t ordered anything yet?  It’s been thirty minutes.  The girls are each asking for food from a different restaurant.  I, forcefully I’ll concede, secure agreement around some Mexican dinner and suggest that my biking over to get ingredients and making it myself will be faster than ordering and waiting for the delivery guy. 

I bump into the Mrs. on the way out.  I try to only seem determined and not snarky.  “I’ve got it.  I’ve got it.  I’ll make it.  It’ll be faster.”  “Wait.  Where are you going?”  It will probably be about the same time either way, but once I know what I want to make, in my mind’s eye, then I’d rather have my food than theirs.

Soon I’m back with onions and tortillas and black beans.  Turn up my random piano bop mix as start in chopping and throwing out plastic.  I bought thin bar of 99% cacao chocolate.  I’ve decided I want the beans to taste something like a mole’ sauce and I put some peppers and a bit too much of the bar in and stir.  A bit of salt.  A bit of sugar.   It’s close, but more chalky than it is mole’-rich.  Watching first bites, my older once notices the taste.  She asks and I conceded that there’s cacao in there but no dairy, 99%.   She considers this politely and helps herself to more guacamole. 

In Antigua, Guatemala back in 1989 there were rows and rows of black mole’ mounds in the market that looked like conical pachyderm stools, and it occurs to me that those women selling mole’ did more than add cacao and peppers to black beans.

Thursday, 10/18/18