Ten Years of Abstention

I was a veg for a decade.  At seventeen I decided to try to align with some of my anarcho-pacifist punk idols emphatic counsel and forego meat.  And once I began I don’t recall it being much of a struggle.  I ate a lot of Fettuccini Alfredo, and calzones and got on with it.  And perhaps because of metabolism, and certainly it was the change in diet, but I within a few months I unwittingly began to lose a lot of extra weight.

I might still be a vegetarian till this day but for a segue I took, to China when I was twenty- seven, ten years after swearing off flesh.  Certainly, much of the ideological fervor that had fuelled a change which became a lifestyle and faded over a decade, and I can remember a few second thoughts about that soft shell crab, before heading off to China, but it was the little round dining table in the Foreign Experts’ Building and the East China Normal University, where the decision was made.  This was the table where I’d be dining for the next year during my scholarship program.  And night, after night, my hosts served a range or remarkably appealing Shanghainese dishes of meat and fish as well as stewed cabbage and rice for me.  Two nights turned into two weeks and at some point I decided I ought to experience a bit more of the cuisine.  And like the Zhou Dynasty, the food of that year is the mystical apogee of perfection family-style Chinese food and no matter where I dine ever after it can never be replicated.

We’re into the second week of the vegetarian challenge here on the home front.  I’m out in the kitchen, pulling form the fridge.  Kale, cuce’s I’ll shave a carrot.  Up in the cabinet I check and there are still raisons and plenty of sunflower seeds.  And there is definitely a prominent can of tuna fish.  As I recall the only thing I used get pangs for sometimes, in the middle of my ten years of abstention, was tuna fish salad. 

I work and work and work and get a call around 5:20PM asking I’ve started to make dinner.  “No. Pretend I’m in an office across town.”  I’ve said, before I can think.  Dodo Marmarosa, the Pittsburgh bee-bop legend, is working furiously, I am working furiously, everyone it seems is working this way.  My older one is home with a flourish and I ask her if she’s OK with ordering out for some burritos.  Two thumbs up.  “Can you call em’ and order four vegie burritos please?”  They do that?  Sure, then have them put tofu in mine too.”

Monday, 01/08/17