buenos noches from an empty room

There will be more words from the road tomorrow; there is much to tell. For tonight, a final picture of me in our home.

Milty doesn't live here anymore.

Peace,
Milton

farewell casserole (aka last supper)

I worked my last shift at the restaurant last night. About a week ago, I asked Chef if I could cook supper for the staff as my goodbye present. He prepares a "family meal," as he calls it, from time to time. Now it was my turn. For our last supper, I chose to prepare one of my favorite dishes growing up: King Ranch Casserole.

The King Ranch was a giant ranch that took of most of Texas that lies between Corpus Christi (the city of my birth) and Brownsville. It was a cattle ranch, so there is some question as to whether they really invented a chicken dish. Texas Monthly ran an article some time back that expanded on the origins of the casserole:

No one seems to know who invented it. The casserole may have come to King Ranch, but the descendants of Captain Richard King prefer to tout their beef and game dishes. "Kind of strange, a King Ranch casserole made with chicken," noted Martin Clement, the head of the public relations for the ranch. Mary Lewis Kleberg, the widow of Dick Kleberg, admits that her heart sinks every time a well-meaning hostess prepares it in her honor. Most likely the dish got its name from an enterprising South Texas hostess or a King Ranch cook whose preference for a poultry doomed him to obscurity.

Yet King Ranch casserole's general origins are easy to discern. Certainly it owes a deep debt to chilaquilas, which also contain chicken, cheese, tomatoes, tortilla chips, and chilies--the staples that campesinos often combine to stretch one meal into two while retaining a semblance of nutrition. But the dish owes as much to post-World War II cooking, when casseroles made with canned soups were the space-age cuisine. Because they could be made quickly and made for later use, casseroles liberated the lady of the house. " The perfect entree for a minimum amount of time in the kitchen for the hostess," the McAllen Junior League cookbook notes. The recipe made its way from one woman's club to another, networking in its most fundamental form. " It was one of those recipes that everybody just had a screaming fit trying to get," Mrs. Joe Gardner of Corpus Christi recalls.

If the women of the fifties loved this recipe because it freed them of the family kitchen, their children love it because it takes them back there. They have adapted it to their taste, of course: Trendy cooks now substitute flour tortillas for corn, while the truly convenience-crazed use Doritos. Purists doctor the recipe for sour cream--a move back toward Mexican authenticity. Houston's Graham Catering has come up with a low-salt version. Even that bastion of Junior Leaguedom, San Antonio's Bright Shawl lunchroom, has changed with the times. Chef Mark Green has followed the lead of the late Dallas gourmet guru Helen Corbitt by dropping canned soups; he now adds his own "roux" of milk, shredded cheese, garlic, and sliced mushrooms. "It sells good," he says. "It goes fast."

My version is more like Mark Green's than my mother's; I didn't open any cans. I made enough for at least twenty; the twelve folks working ate it all. I posted the recipe here.

I timed the serving of our meal to happen before the dinner service got busy, so we all stood around in the kitchen with our bowls and talked and laughed. "The reason I cooked dinner tonight," I told them, "was to say thank you. This has been my favorite kitchen to work in and, even though it's been a short time, I'm sad to leave. Thanks for our time together."

At the end of the evening, they gave me a card, a Red Sox lottery ticket with a chance to win season tickets for life (it wasn't a winner), and bought me a couple of Guinesses for the road.

"We'll miss you," one of the servers said. "You're nice and you can cook; do you know how hard that is to find in this business?"

I was grateful for the compliment.

Peace,
Milton

playgrounds and pain

When Ginger and I moved to Boston in August of 1990, we had been married four months. Now, five months shy of our eighteenth anniversary, we are (we verbalized as we drove into the city today) leaving home. We wondered aloud how we will learn to “let go” of this wonderful city and then began to talk in terms of “changing our grip”: we are headed south to find home in a new city and Boston will remain our hometown.

We are also leaving those who have become family to us. The main point of our trip today was to say goodbye to Cherry, whom we have known since she was in high school and we met her doing a youth camp in Louisiana. She moved to Boston and lived with us for four years and has remained to make a life of her own, part of which includes being a yoga instructor. We met for lunch at Fajitas & ‘Ritas, the site of my fortieth birthday party, and then spent a couple of hours sipping coffee and talking as we sat together on Boston Common across from a playground packed with little kids. I was taken with one little girl in a pink dress who, rather than coming down the slide, slung herself over the side of it at the top, dangled, and then dropped to the ground below. She jumped up, climbed back up the ladder, and did it over and over without hesitancy or harm.

Cherry talked about some of the bodywork she has done in her yoga training. “The reason she doesn’t hurt herself,” Cherry said, “is because she doesn’t resist.” The little girl fell without fear; she didn’t brace herself as though the ground would hurt, she just let go and landed. “We get injured when we brace ourselves in fear,” Cherry continued. “We have to learn to trust the joy.”

John Updike wrote a story called “Trust Me” (in a collection by the same name) many years ago that begins with Harold, as a child, jumping off the edge of the swimming pool to his father’s arms, only to be dropped into the water and moves through various events in his life in which his trust is betrayed or he breaks the trust of one of his loved ones. Then the story ends:

The palms of his hands, less mottled, looked pale and wrinkled, like uncomfortable pillows. In his shirt pocket Harold found tucked the dollar bill rejected at the subway turnstile, extremely long ago. While waiting for Priscilla to relent and call back, he turned to its back side, examined the mystical eye above the truncated pyramid, and read, over and over, the slogan printed above the ONE.

As we sat in the park, I couldn’t help but watch the children moving up and down the chutes and ladders. Their play was not without pain -- I saw them slip on steps and slam into the slides – but joy was the prevailing wind that filled their sails. They dove and jumped and climbed and slid head first without resistance, without fear, without thought that our afternoon was made for anything other than unadulterated joy. And we were three who have trusted each other for a long time struggling not to brace ourselves for the pain that comes with separation. While they played, we were saying goodbye. We were living a pain those children don’t know. They were living a joyous abandon we are hard pressed to find in our own lives. Who then, has the lesson to learn?

I couldn’t help but think of Randy Newman’s old song:

If I had one wish
One dream I knew would come true
I'd want to speak to all the people of the world
I'd get up there, I'd get up there on that platform
First I'd sing a song or two you know I would
Then I'll tell you what I'd do
I'd talk to the people and I'd say
"It's a rough rough world, it's a tough tough world
Well, you know
And things don't always, things don't always go the way we plan
But there's one thing, one thing we all have in common
And it's something everyone can understand
All over the world sing along

I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do"

Buddha taught that life was suffering. I, who at this point in my life am shaped a bit like Buddha, understand how much pain is a part of the fabric of our being and I wonder, after watching the children play today, why I allow myself to see pain as the fundamental connector of humanity so easily. We were created for more than enduring life. Hell, yes life hurts. It hurts a lot. It’s not safe or secure or without danger. And we were created for more than hiding in the corner or bracing ourselves for the next blow. As the goodbyes stack up as high as the boxes in our house, as we prepare to leave home, as our hearts hurt, I want to know how to swing out over the side of the slide and let go and continue to trust that love will catch me.

When I was in tenth grade, we came back from Africa to live in Fort Worth, Texas for a year while my parents were on leave from the mission field. I was carrying fresh wounds of farewells and had no idea how to be an American teenager. One afternoon, I was invited to a church youth event at a local park. Two of the seniors, Cathy Shelton and David Piland, who both seemed so beautiful and cool to me, sang Elton John’s “Love Song.” It was the first time I had heard of Elton or the song (actually written by Lesley Duncan). As they sang, the sounds of the children on the playground behind them bled through the microphone underneath their voices just like it does on the record (as I discovered when I bought it). The children giggled and shouted and played as Cathy and David sang:

Love is the opening door
Love is what we came here for
No one could offer you more
Do you know what I mean
Have your eyes really seen

Thirty-seven years later, the juxtaposition of playgrounds and pain still speaks to me, calling me beyond the hurt to informed hope. Whatever we know of sorrow and skinned knees, however marked we are by wounds and worries, they are not what makes us human. We were born by Love, we are bound by Love, and Love will carry us home.

Trust me.



Peace,
Milton