Waiting for You

 I met a girl, and she opened my eyes.

I wanted things I never wanted before.

She shared stories that I never knew existed

Tales I never could have imagined.

When I awoke she was nowhere

Out on the front porch, I noticed a glow on the horizon

I knew what I had to do

I rode off into the frontier.

As the years went by I grew in knowledge and wisdom

I could tell by the feel of the wind when it was time to go

One great adventure after another, she always led me

It was a cool evening and  I saw her walk by

my creativity surged with no limits

but then I turned to look and again, she was gone.

As the years go by I find that I need to push forward on her memory and what she showed me

Every time I see her, I watch and miss her knowing she will disappear

Our encounter becomes more of a deep well giving water endlessly only if I strive to remember.

Today I have to search inside and look for ways to bring her into my day.

Some are crafty deceptions, some are close encounters with her

Together, these make me possible, pushing forward. Ever pushing forward.

Digging in the Dirt

 Occasionally, I write about something I would never have attempted. I perceive this as growth and courage, but it can be far more difficult when in the trenches that I find myself digging. 

Photo by Sharosh Rajasekher on Unsplash

While nothing exists until the day I tap that "Publish" button, there is a pressure that I cannot define before that moment of release. The absolute need to get that piece of life out and to let it fly free is a powerful entity. 

A piece such as that cannot be written in a day, a week, or a month. It is all relative to how intense and dense the account is. Complexities exist not only on the day I share the accounts but also on the day I write about them.

There are no shortcuts to reaching the goal. The process is full of reflection, regret, sadness, and nostalgia. There is no detachment when telling a good story. Initially, it must be experienced and recorded; only after that can a third person's perspective be shared, as it's only then that I can see it in that light.

I can be impatient. I am learning the process I find myself on a ride where there is no way to get off until it is complete. Choices are no longer an option once that ride begins. It is time to commit, hold on, and tell the story that needs to be told. That becomes my only mission at that time. Otherwise, I am incomplete.

Things we don't know

 I thought I felt it. I could swear it was there, that ever-slight vibration in the earth and something in the air. It is what you see when you do not look, but your mind can fill in the void. There is something happening somewhere.

There are subtleties in the words and body language of an old friend. You can miss them if you only think about your own house. Something is smoldering and for some reason, we need something to implode to give our attention to it.

Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash

Why do I walk with my eyes closed when it comes to you? Somewhere if I just open them, I might see you crying. How did I miss so many signals? I have boasted that in the golden era of time, I was raised in the field of empathy. 

How do I know you are hurting if I was wrong about so much? I try to feel like I never have before and still, I fall so short. There is a world of hurt out there and we all carry what we have. Escalation and intensity finally pull the disaster into the light. If only we could see it before now, we could nurture the wounds.

No, we will wait until we are all moving at high velocity and then the inevitable happens, a wheel begins to shudder and it tears away from us as we tumble down into disaster and new normal. It will become the pivotal moment of our lives to which we divide the now from the then. 

In a moment of personal breakthrough, I think about you my friend. I look at you intently: "are you OK?" You nod and crack a quick smile and irreverent remark. I do not break my eye contact. "No, ARE you OK?" This time silence. I will not say it again as this would only be degrading, but the truth between our eyes makes you look away. "No. No I am not", you say. 

It is in the slowing down that we find our way. Once upon a time we did that. There was one day that we used to allow us to talk, to build, to play and just hang out. It would seem, that in all of our youthful lack of wisdom, we knew what to do, we just didn't know it.

The Stranger

I met a stranger on the day that he died, and my life was never the same.

I was just a boy of fifteen when the stranger rode into town. I was sitting in the saloon, sipping on short glasses of ice, complete with a couple of molecules of ginger ale. This justification was a lie for a man who could never look at himself in a mirror. I was a passenger. I had in tow with me the girl I would know forever, but the days of our acquaintance were numbered.

December came, and I was almost giddy with self-imposed tradition: I would turn my attention to the nighttime stratosphere and extract light that could not be seen from the dark sky. The times were changing, yes, they were, but I gleefully felt that I could hold on to the world I grew up in.

I was hanging with my southern boogie friends and my guitar-wielding women. They fed me everything I needed when that stranger came to town. As he approached the entrance he was thriving but I did not hear him at all, and then suddenly oblivion, he was shot down the moment he arrived.

I woke from a misty December dream and saw him lying in the street, the town echoed with the wailing of his widow, hands bloodied, disbelieving in shock. I came to him, knowing that there was nothing that I, nor anyone could do.

Photo by Juan Di Nella on Unsplash

Everyone around me knew him so well and a shockwave blasted through the crowd of people that were gathering like a fire fueled by gasoline. A trapdoor opened under my knees as I knelt next to his lifeless body and I fell away from all of the people I knew, joining the friends of this stranger.

Suddenly as if in a dream, the stranger got up and told me to take a journey with him. The first part of that journey lasted four years. As we traveled, somehow he let me feel his life but in a way that only I could feel it, so it was not the same as it happened to him, but in a strange way, it was exactly what I needed to understand so many things about myself. The southern boogie friends and guitar-wielding women were still dear to me, but they paled in comparison to the stranger who had become part of who I was.

As the years went by the idea that we as a world once lived, jumped and breathed in a season of such unparalleled creativity seemed so impossible, yet we know it was there. So many years later, I am still learning from this friendship that I could never have imagined. The relationship built friendships in my life that I think may never have happened, had I not met the stranger.

I met a stranger on the day that he died. My life was never the same after that, and I am so thankful that I got to know him at all.

When the Walls Fell Down

It happened in a moment. It was summer, but I must have dreamed it. My entire life was laid out before me, and then I was ambushed and found out that what I knew, I did not know. 

I was good, but then I found out that I was not. Even worse, I had not been good for a long time, and now I knew.

Photo by M Alazia on Unsplash

It is always like that absolute shift in reality that the entire world had on 9/11. For seventeen minutes that morning, we all thought a terrible accident had happened. Then at 9:03 am, Flight 175 hit the south tower and then we knew that everything we knew was wrong.

As we watch video footage, we feel an incredible desire to rewrite the events of that September morning or whenever we watch the Challenger lift off on January 28, 1986. The loss cannot be counted, and the ripple that follows lifts the ties, tracks, and spikes right out of the ground and takes them elsewhere.

Sometimes, I looked down the corridor and I knew that if I walked down the hallway, the building would collapse upon me. Sometimes I did that, and sometimes I did not.

In the times in which I felt there was no warning, I looked back and could see that there were always signs and warnings along the way. Lying to oneself can come so easily.

It was a bitter cold Saturday afternoon in January of 1978. We sat in the warmth of Torrington's Warner Theatre. Charlene and I had just settled into the movie, Saturday Night Fever. Suddenly, something I had never seen happen before, they turned down the movie and paged her. Ninety seconds later, everything was different. It will always be engraved in me. Eternally, she is standing in the aisle, crying and I hear her voice still. Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in a cigarette-smoke-filled kitchen, stuck. 

When the walls fell down, sometimes we did things. Sometimes we did not do things. The gambler knows when to hold and when to fold. He is not always right and the more he is successful you can be sure it came with so much loss. 

When the walls fell down I learned, I cried, and I was angry. When the walls fell down I had to build something from ruins always feeling the pain of not having built what I could have before the collapse.

When the walls fell down I wanted to fall down too. A world-saving mission had just failed, and now the planet was knocked out of its orbit and was hurtling into outer space to die a cold and dark death. I wanted to find a mountaintop somewhere to just watch it all fade away.

But there was something inside of me that said no. There was something that made me get up and continue. I hated it, and it made me furious, but it drove me to my feet and I clenched my fists and I screamed. I stood up with the ruins at my feet, knowing now what really happened, knowing I was about to build from whatever was left. Would it be better, I don't know. I just know that it would be fortified with the walls that fell down and somehow, this would add strength.

Silver Springs

 When I was down, with affliction so precise and unique, it was a pain that hurt more than walking against the storms of addiction. I had forgotten what that could feel like and I am thankful for that. What I did not know was I could be there again, even if it was not me that that storm came upon. 

I forgot the pain that my heart could feel, the devastation so complete. Rewriting everything is something I never could imagine, but here I am in a lonely room, looking at an empty wall and seeing all the things I didn't do.

Photo by Dan Gribbin on Unsplash

I could never imagine my world without you in it. Throughout the winds, the rain, and darkness we had each other's hands. We spoke with one voice and loved with one heart, and I don't understand how they can be so separate.

When you pulled away I heard the music play and somehow I knew what the words were before I heard them. It was everything I had feared and even worse and I keep hoping I am being dramatic. 

It takes me back to a Friday night dream so many years ago. I saw a flash of what I wanted and knew it just could never be. I hurt with the pain of a person who had to climb onto a spaceship and never see the earth again. The world was gone and adapting to that would be a deception that I could never buy. 

Every moment of every day, I rewrite our past in my mind. I know it cannot change anything, but I cannot help it, I have to do something. The richness you gave me is unimaginable and it will take forever to understand, and maybe even longer than that.

In these days, I stand on the bridge. The leaves fall and I know the winter is coming. I bravely stand at my side of the bridge, honoring the person that you are - the person I know you are. It is everything. It is absolutely everything. Now I have nothing to focus on except myself, the person I need to get to know. Of all of the things that you have given me, will this be the greatest gift? I don't know, because it is everything. 

My Firstborn Awakening

 You could never know the life you made, the definition you brought, and the love you showed me that can exist in one person's heart. I will never forget the moment I held you with you looking up into my eyes, I could not imagine the intensity that came with you. Since that day, you have me in awe all of the time.

When I woke up this morning, I was so thankful that I had you, I had to reach out and tell you I love you and to have a great day. Then you said it back, and I wanted to cry because I cannot count the so many ways I am privileged to have you for my son.

You have defined things in me that I did not know were discernable in so many ways. That is just the side effect for me. In your journey, the many complexities that make you who you are, blossom into showing that you are a man of great integrity. Of all the people I have ever met, I have learned the most from you. 

My own angst fought me at times, making it so hard for us to speak the same language and these were the things that I needed to learn. My eyes often were closed and my mouth was yet speaking. You have given me so much credit; sometimes I do not see how I can be treated with such generosity.

I know in my heart that it really has nothing to do with what you said or I said. It is more about when you love someone as much as I love you, that kind of power can be impossible to comprehend and channel. Love makes me want to give you the finest advantage in your path. Ironically, that same love can be what causes me to not hear and to not see.

We are good though. As time went on, we found our common goals and in them, we could hear and see each other. I want every moment to always be like that. As I look back on my comparatively short time with my father, I so hope that he felt that he had those times with me. In his last hour, he struggled to physically see me with every ounce of strength. In my heart that tells me it was absolutely: yes, he did.

Here today, I strive for an acute awareness of not letting the fullness of our relationship ever slide through our hands. With a boldness that we were born with, a passion that after the explosion keeps progressing as though walking determinedly through mere smoke, never letting the barnacles of this world cover over what is pure energy to be who we are. Who we are to each other. 

I always say that my life has been a wild ride. Sure, but I have also been blessed in more ways than I had ever thought possible. I don't think you could ever know what you mean to me, because it is something that cannot be measured, never be counted, too great to ever be taken in with mere sight. I can write infinite paragraphs and never come close to how I feel about you. 

All I can say is "Thank you". When you were born I never knew that I could have such a friend and someone who could teach me so much and give me so much. I will always fight for that and not only do I need to live it, but it needs to be here, in these words always.

Quit Jammin' Me!

Sometimes I think I’m so smart...

Come on now! 24 years of constantly cooking, experimenting, tasting, burning, succeeding, winning, and losing! You would think, I would have this thing pretty much in the bag, wouldn’t you? Let me tell you though, I am still only learning. 

There is so much inspiration out there to glean yet never enough time in a day to take it in with any coherency. I want to learn, apply, and feed my people good and delicious food. I want to do it without unnecessary steps or waste.  I want every moment to count in a meaningful way.

Tina Choi's Doobydobap, Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat, Mike Greenfield's Life by MikeG, and of course the one who does not even know she has the force within her, June as in junelikethemonth are all part of this Swiss army knife of innovation and experience that I wish to fold into my own, go-with-the-flow technique. It is a whole universe floating around in my brain.

Then there is the fact that the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know. Let's call that the Butterfly Pea Effect. The beautiful blue tea arrives at the table. You just know when you squeeze that lemon slice into the tea it will turn green, but then it turns purple!

By now you are asking; "Mike, what are you even talking about?"  and you are right. Let me explain.  

Good judgment, based on food experience, makes one a better cook and judge when ordering food out. So imagine my satisfaction when we dined at a wonderful Thai restaurant in Littleton, New Hampshire. www.tastethethaiandsushihouse.com We had an excellent experience. There was nothing showy or gratuitous about this restaurant. The staff was warm, helpful, and genuine as well. 

For starters, the shrimp shu mai, and pan-fried potstickers were wonderful. Donna ordered the Tom Kha soup which is shrimp, Coconut milk broth with onion, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, tomato, galangal, lime juice, mushroom, and cilantro. Just the right amount of every ingredient.

One of the resources you have in an excellent server is their opportunity to be your consultant and tour guide. In a restaurant that really sets out to serve their customer the best experience they can, when asked by the diner, "What is the dish you see everyone coming here to have?" That server will give you a real answer that does not simply steer you to the most expensive item on the menu. You can always tell the difference from the answer you get too.

Our server answered my question with two possibilities: 

The first offer was Massaman Curry with Avocado, one of the most popular Thai curry. This dish was listed on CNN Travel as #1 most delicious food in the world in 2017!! Choice of meat with Potato, white onions, carrot, and cashew nuts. In coconut milk and Massaman curry.

The second offer was Thai Basil Pad Kra Prow. Beef stir-fried with basil sauce, garlic, onions, green bean, bell peppers, and basil.

Naturally, since potatoes are very much a part of the Axis of Evil, I ordered the Thai Basil Pad Kra Prow and was very pleased with the choice. If you are not familiar with my aversion to potatoes, see https://fight4taste.blogspot.com/2022/06/please-don-pass-potatoes.html.

I usually do not write about a single dining experience. What happened in less than 24 hours from this very nice meal perplexes me. We were driving through Lincoln, New Hampshire in the early afternoon. We pulled into a parking lot to look at lunch choices locally on my phone. The place where we were parked got our attention.

Five Main on the River in North Woodstock had several items on their menu that seemed to be winners. We decided we had already arrived at our lunch spot. The mussels, chicken lollipops, goat cheese spinach artichoke dip, and soups seemed to be spot-on to what sounded good to us. The inside was a pub with big televisions playing over the attractive bar.

The more we thought about it, nickel and diming these app-style foods into a lunch will turn into a dinner-size bill which plainly seemed frivolous. Since they had pizza, it made sense to just do that. This is where we go off the rails. We could have just ordered traditional pizza and man, I wish we had. No, we had to order "The Mediterranean" off of the "Handtossed Signature Pizza" section.

Normally, my brain understands that if you take a piece of pizza dough, and spread it out on a pizza pan, then top it with; spinach, kalamata olives, artichokes, pepperoncini, a pound of feta cheese, many very large heirloom tomato slices intimidatingly covering much of the surface of the pie, fresh garlic, oregano, red onions, and roasted garlic. Balancing these toppings on top of a pizza without any effort to remove some of the moisture from them basically gave the pizza the same moisture content had we covered it in cucumbers. 

When it arrived at the table, the bottom of the crust had some color, showing that the pizza oven had browned it. Donna did not like the top's uncooked appearance and frankly, I was not pleased either. The idea of sending it back scared me more than eating it as is, but after talking it back and forth, we asked our waiter, who seemed to have never been asked to take something back ever before in his life, to please take the pizza and brown it more on the top. 

I had a core aversion to this idea, but my food radar was being jammed somehow. When the pizza arrived again, the top did appear to be cooked more and thanks to the laws of physics and gravity, the 9 ounces of water content that was once in that pile of vegetables on top of the pizza had now migrated into the crust. Now the crust has the consistency of what happens when someone tries to make a carb-free crust but has no knowledge of what to use, so the ingredients never come together to make a composed crust. Like a gas giant planet, there is not an actual surface that is firm enough to stand on. The worst part is we did this to ourselves.

I know that there are many people who would have sent this back, but by this time we were here over an hour and a half. We ordered the ridiculous "Mediterranean" which has items that should not be on a pizza unless you can carefully roast and drain some of the moisture out of them. But then we requested that they do something to take this abomination and ruin it completely. I felt that sending it back would have led to a need for systemic education. This is a foundational issue with the restaurant and one that I find hard to believe exists. I do also hold out hope that the person prepping and cooking this alien-like food substance is not the normal person who carefully portions, dries, and preps toppings so they are more balanced pleasingly rustic, and tasty.

We took the rest with us, me thinking that somehow I could salvage at least the toppings. 2 mornings later, I opened the box, and when I touched the crust, its cold, wet, slimy texture caused me to involuntarily hurtle the whole mess into the trash can without even thinking about it.

This was my fault. Even if a restaurant thinks they are all cool and trendy by having all of these things on a pizza that I could see Jamie Oliver making, the laws of culinary physics say NO, NO, and NO!!!

So I wonder, who or what is jamming my culinary radar? I feel this is a graduation in which I have tons of new uncategorized other knowledge and it is not indexed yet. I feel that I am in a gear, topping out fruitful RPM and I am about to look down at the gearshift and notice there is another gear that I can shift up into. But not before I make a mistake of another kind.

Fight4Taste Friday comes, and I decide on egg rolls. F4TF is something I voluntarily do in which i cook lunch for the staff at my place of work. Unilaterally you will hear that those eggrolls were delicious and they were, but stupid technical disasters were everywhere.

Ice packs were too cold so the rolls cooled the oil too much, I did not cook the vegetable filling which caused more moisture in the vegetables (sound familiar), and cooled the oil too as well as made the wrappers tough to chew because they sort of steamed. The wrappers were older having been frozen and then thawed which makes them hard to deal with, they break if you look at them too hard and they do not handle moisture well at all. The odd thing is: I know better.

Finally, there is another jamming of my perception and that is my generous spirit to give culinary institutions a chance after they burn me.  I did just this last night with a restaurant that has been in operation for as long as I can remember. Joy Wah on the Connecticut River in Vermont. My wife was passing by and I was not feeling up to cooking. The last time we got food there, I think it was in 2020, we had a miserable takeout experience, which last night, I decided to attribute to the COVID-19 pandemic.  I was wrong. This is a restaurant that is clearly trying to save money by cutting or skimping on flavor components. The fried rice is only trashcan-worthy. The boneless pork was overcooked to the consistency of hard plastic. Their egg rolls were underwhelming. When is this going to stop?

I have often said that because people have been brainwashed into thinking that they cannot cook many of these things, they are eventually reduced to people who can be fed a rock with barbeque sauce on it and come away thinking it was awesome! We need this to stop!

The final jamming. There is so many distractions that always get in the way of me really getting the good food out there. I make it all the time. So many people say they don't have the time. Believe me, I do not have the time! Because I still do this it turns my life upside down, I hardly sleep, my RA tries to pin me down, and I live in pain. But I am fighting. I don't want to surrender! I cannot give up. I do wish I would stop being so stupid when I know I have the knowledge, wisdom, and determination to make better decisions concerning cooking and eating. So whatever it is: Quit jamming me!