Vague Flavor Lift

The teachers were all out in front of the main gym on their exercise bikes.  This morning I came up and heard a great old Temptations tune: “I Can’t Get Next to You.”  I bought a compilation album of theirs when I was twenty or so, with that on it. At first I couldn’t place it as anything beyond a vague familiarity:  Four part harmonies bragging about all they could do, turning rivers into raging fires, but there is that one thing I cannot do . . . ah yes, “I can’t get next to you.” 

And if I was to join in a public class like that I would certainly bike extra hard if that song came on.  I’d surrender to the urgency and the memory and the revel in the recognition of something powerful in public.  But then then next song would come on and this bike class DJ has varied tastes.  When the humiliatingly awful song came on next the only reason I’d pedal hard would be to try to escape and hide myself from being publicly associated with something as awful as what they often play.  Before the Temptations can get next to anybody I’ve got my earphones in.

A bit of hobbled cooking later that evening for dinner.  I’m up.  My turn.  Fair enough.  I’m gonna make something out of what’s here and there won’t be any meat in it.  I can feel the moisture saturating my culinary creative spark. I could combine the cabbage and the zucchini and make it all a bit mustardly.  Thoughts turn vaguely Teutonic.  Dice some sun dried tomatoes, boiled raisons and pitted olives and mix it all up in the couscous.  They aren’t big fans of such tomatoes nor olives but all chopped up I’m hoping they don’t recognize anything other than a vague flavor-lift.

The older one has filled a Pyrex dish with the couscous for her lunch tomorrow.  “It was good baba” the little one says as she left the table.  I register all this as something like a B+.  I don’t worry with them an ingredient rundown.  My wife is reading Chinese to the girls now too.  I’m very glad for this.  But now there is a line upstairs to read to the older one.  I snuggle up with the little one instead and return to Beryll and Blix in 1936, making their way north, across Kenya, in the Leopard Moth.

Wednesday, 01/10/17