Kitchen

kitchen

mara

the function of joy

All three dogs swimming in the backyard pool which Liz has installed for her beloved Henry. Picture taken around the time of Erin's visit, July 2006.

A Teacher's Day: The Seymour Brownstein Most Improved Student Award

A Teacher's Day: The Seymour Brownstein Most Improved Student Award
Send donations to:

Mollison
Seymour Brownstein Award
c/o Michael Brownstein
4415 S. King Sr.
Chicago, IL 60653

Home practice

6:15 to 6:45 Sitting
6:45 to 7 dharma notes
>Continued study of Training the Mind
>Memorization of several slogans
>Memorization of Discourse on Loving Kindness

A Two Minute Egg

Alan, my cousin whose hair had grown so thin
Whose voice had grown so soft
A brief visitor in my garden apartment,
When my father died.
He knew how to make the two minute egg.

Heat water till it boils. Place the egg into it as the water continues to boil for two minutes. Then cool the egg.

So I try and even with sauce pan tilted, the water is too shallow and the egg hits and breaks. The albumen swirls, whitening through the water.
Carefully I slide in the second attempt. It hits the bottom softly, cracks a little and rests.
Two minutes. I retrieve and cool my egg, placing it in a delicate blue and white patterned egg dish, rimmed with gold.

A salt cat naps by an over stuffed pink, spotted pepper chair.

On a slate green earthen plate, a small silver spoon rests which I use to crack off the top of the egg shell.

Each image brims over like the broken shell and the yolk's yellow stain.

Through the salt and pepper cat and chair, a woman remembers her cat of 20 years.

The spoon, my father's gift to my mother, along with blue china to match her wedding. She hated the spoon and the china and the wedding.

Last, the plate, abandoned by a previous owner in a damp, muddy wooded cabin where I played as a child; where after a rain, the lake turned brown and the clay sucked at our boots; where the putrid, dark muck by the stream stained our shoes.

I saw the blue patterned, gold egg cup and tried to make the perfect two minute egg, because I remembered my mother and how she would receive her breakfast tray and smile and her ease in the warm morning sun.

Through the crack in my egg came sadness,
A loyal cat and a man,
And a woman remembering,
A child's shoes in the mud --
Intrusive images insisting:
My mother's ease was my mother's;
My egg tastes different.

bidwell

Surviving another night at the Eastend.

The Turtle at Play

Dwight's first venture into Chicago theater, in a play by the luminous Beau O'Reilly of the Curious Branch Theater. If you failed to receive this play, then you are out of touch with the power and creative energy of small Chicago theater, one of the city's greatest treasures.

the cat

The rosy tan cat, rescued then orphaned by some German
guests rubs at my leg, underneath this garden table of wood
and wrought iron lattice with petal like design at its center.
We chat with French Pascal and German travel agent whom
Angela has befriended. We all share the ambilvalence of our
Sicilian expatriate status. We love the sun and the beauty of
the land. And run home to France to give birth to our
children : Respectfully disdain the Sicilian man in his
automobile. Experience has taught that we cannot always
expect sheets and towels to be provided. Angela is a bit of a
wild card, because she has the 'forza Siciliana'. She loves me
enough to feel it sometimes with me. But anyone can see it in
her. Strolling in the plain light of the garden; sitting on the
three legged stool on the dirty sidewalk at the Palermo bus
stop; and purring while eating the ensalata di mare, puzzling
over which juices to soak up with the sesame bread.
Today, it continues. We stop at the bus station bar at Porta
Polermo, all men. 'Posse?' Angela marches in, borrows
today's paper from the cashier person and proceeds to the
cafe area on the edge of the bus station where the men are
grouped in idleness and focused in conversation and
discussion around three tables. Men rise quickly to
relinquish chairs so that she can read at the one empty
table. With my beer at €1.30, even my most casual
commitment to budgeting yields an inviolate conclusion that
I could drink freely and remain within my budget. And the
pace of drinking is slow and steady.
With a population of 50,000, Sciacca's modern coexists with
her old fishing village ways. Two steady streams of traffic
merge at rush hour through the massive stone and wooden
gate called Porto Palermo. Shops on both arteries are full of
the latest world brands, costly and high in fashion. Bus
stations from Chicago to Delhi have a common feel: noisy,
commercial, people in motion, air is rank with smell of
exhaust and fuel. In this port town, fish fresh,
neither 'congelato' nor 'surgelato' is cleaned and sold, to be
carried home wrapped in newspaper for dinners taken at 8
PM and later. Dinner is our priority with the last bus leaving
at 8.
As I continue to nurse my beer at the slow steady,
Sicilian pace, Angela is off, finds the bus driver who took us
into town for a recommendation on a place for dinner. In the
dusk of this bustling place, improbably she finds him; he
asks 'Dové su marito?' and off we go in a parade, led by the
young dark haired bus driver, next his balding, white haired
older friend, and Angela with a sprightly step and what can
only be called her 'jaunty' Italian straw hat to match, with me
bringing up the rear, completing the scene by photographing
as we march through the narrow streets to find a trattoria
that opens early.'Tutto pescé?", "Va bené" is the
foundational exchange, followed almost immediately by a
discussion of the new pope. For the new pope live from St.
Peter's Square is giving his first papal blessing. Ratzinger, a
German.From the waiter whose commitment to service is
paramount, we get a hand gesture of ambivalence. "It is not
good because we cannot understand the Germans". From the
owner, the hand gesture is unequivocal and no words are
necessary.

Back at the bus, the driver calls for a detailed report on what
we have eaten and what we have paid. The turning of the
index finger to create the dimple in the cheek marks his
agreement that all is well and a final 'Va bené'