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down the long road

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

One of my tasks in preparing to move is to go through my CDs and transfer the bulk of them to my MacBook instead of boxing them all up to head south. I’ve invested a lot of money in CDs over the years, collecting a good bit of interest, though not of the monetary kind. I’ve spent the better part of the day in the D through G section of our collection and have downloaded music from almost one hundred of the silver discs, finding some old friends, bringing up some wonderful memories, and raising some interesting questions. (Who is the Willard Grant Conspiracy and why do I have one of their records?)

Cliff Eberhardt is a singer/songwriter I learned about soon after moving to Boston, thanks to David Wilcox’s covers of a couple of his songs. I hadn’t listened to The Long Road in a long time. The title track is a wonderful duet with Richie Havens (one of the best voices ever) and the lyric says:

There are the ones that you call friends.
There are the ones that you call late at night.
There are the ones who sweep away your past
With one wave of their hand.

There are the ones that you call family.
There are the ones that you hold close to your heart.
They are the ones who see the danger in you
Who won’t understand.

I can hear your voice in the wind.
Are you calling to me, down the long road?
Do you really think there’s an end?
I have followed my dream
Down the long road.

You are the one that I met long ago.
You are the one who saw my dream.
You are the one, took me from my home
And left me off somewhere.

Somehow I feel you are here
And you are waiting in that dream.
And somewhere down this road we will awake
And be at the start again.

I can hear your voice in the wind.
Are you calling to me, down the long road?
Do you really think there’s an end?
I have lived my whole life
Down the long road.

I gotta find you tonight.
Are you waiting for me, down the long road?
Do you really think there’s an end?
I have lived my whole life
Down the long road.

Are you waiting for me?
I can hear your voice in the wind.
Are you calling to me, down the long road?
Do you really think there’s an end?
I have lived my whole life
Down the long road.

In these days of change, when some things are moving faster than we can keep up with and others not moving at all (anyone want to buy a house at the beach?), the question in the song is haunting:

Do you really think there’s an end?

I think I have lived my whole life down the long road. Now, it stretches out again and turns so quickly and so sharply that we can’t see much more than a few steps ahead. We are going to have to make some important and difficult choices without knowing how the terrain is going as we make the turn.

Ginger did a great job on Sunday shedding fresh light on Peter and John’s encounter with the man at the gate. “We don’t have any money,” they said (I’m with them so far), “but what we have we’ll gladly give. In the name of Jesus, get up and walk.”

What healing work can we do in Jesus’ name, is the way I heard what she was saying.

When I was in seminary and John Claypool was preaching, I heard someone criticize him by saying, “The only people who relate to him are the walking wounded and those trapped in adolescent rebellion.”

Without really thinking, I looked at the guy and said, “Who’s left?”

We have all spent our whole lives on the long road. The most consistent daily act of healing we can do in Jesus’ name is to get up and walk: walk into the middle of our families and friends and work places and schools and wherever else we walk and offer ourselves.

I can hear God calling our names.

Peace,
Milton

fall

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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10

Our burning bush
is just starting
to singe around
the edges.
Before long
without smoke
or fire, the leaves
will blaze brilliantly
without burning up
and fall to the earth.

We talk about
colors, yet name
this season
for the letting go,
the breeze-ride
down from life
into death.

How can it be
so energizing
to see what was
once verdant
and vibrant
flame and die?

I try to listen.
I want to hear
what the leaves
are saying
as they burn
and fall.

All I can do
is go barefoot.

Peace,
Milton

This poem was written in response to prompts at Abbey of the Arts and Writers’ Island.

red dirt girl

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
6

On the way home from church to go to work, I heard the end of this interview with Emmylou Harris on NPR. She has a new boxed set out of rare tracks and unreleased material that I am now coveting in the worst way. One of the songs she sang during the interview (accompanied by Buddy Miller) was “Boy from Tupelo”:

You don’t love me this I know
Don’t need a Bible to tell me so
I hung around a little too long
I was good but now I’m gone

Like the buffalo
That boy from Tupelo
Any way the wind can blow
That’s where I’m gonna go
I’ll be gone like a five and dime
It’ll be the perfect crime
Just ask the boy from Tupelo
He’s the king and he ought to know

The shoulder I’ve been leaning on
Is the coldest place I’ve ever known
There’s nothing left for me round here
Looks like it’s time to dissapear

Like the buffalo
That boy from Tupelo
The old wall down in Jericho
Maybelle on the radio
I’ll be gone like the five and dime
It’ll be the perfect crime
Just ask the boy from Tupelo
He’s the king and he ought to know

You don’t love me, this I know
Don’t need a Bible to tell me so
It’s a shame and it’s a sin
Everything I could have been to you

Your last chance Texaco
Your sweetheart of the rodeo
A Juliet to your Romeo
The border you cross into Mexico
I’ll never understand why or how
Oh but baby its too late now
Just ask the boy from Tupelo
He’s the king and he ought to know

In looking at the play list for the songs on the CDs, I found this one, which seems worth passing along. It’s called “Prayer in Open D.”

There’s a valley of sorrow in my soul
Where every night I hear the thunder roll
Like the sound of a distant gun
Over all the damage I have done
And the shadows filling up this land
Are the ones I built with my own hand
There is no comfort from the cold
Of this valley of sorrow in my soul

There’s a river of darkness in my blood
And through every vein I feel the flood
I can find no bridge for me to cross
No way to bring back what is lost
Into the night it soon will sweep
Down where all my grievances I keep
But it won’t wash away the years
Or one single hard and bitter tear

And the rock of ages I have known
Is a weariness down in the bone
I use to ride it like a rolling stone
Now just carry it alone

There’s a highway risin’ from my dreams
Deep in the heart I know it gleams
For I have seen it stretching wide
Clear across to the other side
Beyond the river and the flood
And the valley where for so long I’ve stood
With the rock of ages in my bones
Someday I know it will lead me home

Amen.

Peace,
Milton

a day of peace

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

Thanks to Tess at Anchors and Masts, I saw the video below and learned about the work of Peace Direct and that today, September 21, is the United Nations International Day of Peace.

At one point in the short film, as Gill is putting on her artificial legs, the text reads, “Gill believes in the power of the individual and that everyone can make a difference.” What struck me as I worked on this post is the strength to be peace builders comes not from individuals, but individuals committed to community. I’ll demonstrate what I mean.

As I said, Tess led me to Peace Direct and to the UN Peace Day site. In a parallel journey, Randy’s post on scorn led me to Bill and Grant’s words on the same subject, all of them speaking in their way to what it means to learn to wage peace. Bill defines scorn as the feeling or belief that someone or something is worthless or despicable; the verb, is to feel or express contempt or derision for someone or something.

Randy confesses:

It is all too easy for me to take a position of scorn relative to someone else. If I think he is dumb, I express scorn. If I think he is obtuse, I express scorn. If he doesn’t agree with me, I express scorn. If he doesn’t drive like I want him to, I express scorn. If he makes my job more difficult, I express scorn. If I don’t like the way he looks, I express scorn.

Scorn makes me ugly.

Me, too. As long as I was dealing with definitions, I looked up peace and was struck by one word in two of the definitions:

  • the normal, nonwarring condition of a nation, group of nations, or the world;
  • the normal freedom from civil commotion and violence of a community.

Peace as normal. What a concept.

Again, still dealing with words and borrowing ideas from those around me, I remembered my friend Don pointing out in a Bible study that our words listen and obey come from the same root.

c.1290, from O.Fr. obeir, from L. oboedire “obey, pay attention to, give ear,” lit. “listen to,” from ob “to” + audire “listen, hear” (see audience). Same sense development is in cognate O.E. hiersumnian.

I’ve also been reading the blog of a former student who is enrolled in the University for Peace in Costa Rica.

I had just sat down to write this morning with peace swirling all around me when the wheels fell off. We got word that our realtor had scheduled two home invasions (as I like to call them), one today and one tomorrow. She also suggested we rearrange the furniture in the large room that is both our living and dining area because the way we have chosen to live is “too unconventional” for most folks who are looking to buy a house.

I knew nothing of these people who are looking for a new home, but I felt scorn nonetheless. I felt better than them. We walked into this house seven years ago and it was a mess. The colors were atrocious, the house was a mess, and there were holes in the kitchen floor dug by the two large dogs who lived here along with the woman who owned it. To even think about buying it required at least enough imagination to see beyond her living in the space. And now our house won’t sell because the dullards who are looking can’t get past the dining table and the couch being placed in a less than conventional manner?

Screw peace. I wanted to open a can of whupass on somebody. It was time to beat some imagination into these idiots. (Now I understand why realtors don’t want you to be home when people come by.) When we got through moving the furniture, I came back to the computer to find all the peace links I had already saved in preparation for writing. I read what Randy and Bill and Grant and Jane and Tess had to say. I watched Gill climb up on the block seat and attach her artificial legs. I looked into what is now the living room to see Lola climb up in her usual perch on top of the couch cushions, nonplussed that she had been moved. And I felt silly, small, and sinful.

My anger is about being displaced. I don’t get to live in my home anymore; I live in a house that’s for sale. I don’t get to feel settled anymore because we are moving. The apparent lack of imagination that exists in the minds of today’s homebuyer is not the source of my rage, just an easy target. If I’m going to be a peacemaker, then easy targets can’t be a part of the equation. It can’t be about targets at all. Somehow, it’s about moving beyond the scorn and the rage and all the types of violence that pervade my life and listening to the solidarity of our humanity. Rather than seeing them as idiots, I’m called to listen and learn to see those folks who will walk our floors this afternoon as people traveling the same road we walked seven years ago and will walk again across floors in Durham in the weeks ahead. I’m called to listen to a larger world where my sense of displacement pales by comparison with those in Sudan and Iraq and Gaza and Indonesia and Burma and New Orleans who have been cut off from home and history by violence I know nothing of on a personal level. If I listen well, my rage can become resonance, which is something peace can be built upon. Bill quotes Paul from Philippians 4:8:

Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.

In the Peace Direct video, the text says, “For us, peace is about strength, courage, determination, and action.” We are all crippled by the violence done by and to us. Everyday, it seems, feels like International Violence Day. We were not created to destroy one another, but to listen and to love, which both matter most in the most basic of relationships.

I heard the call to peace today while reading blogs and moving furniture. I’m praying for the courage to listen and obey.

Peace,
Milton

hope and heartbreak

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

Somewhere around April 20, give or take a couple of days, the Red Sox moved into first place in the American League East. On April 20, we were two games ahead of the Yankees. Today, September 20, we have a game and a half lead over the Evil Empire with nine games left to play. All season long it has looked like we were going to win our division for the first time in a decade; now, even though we are going to make the playoffs, our first place finish is not a given. Don’t get me wrong – I still think we’re going to win it, but we’re just going to have to sweat more than we imagined doing so.

One of the things the Sox gave up with their loss last night was their claim to the best record in baseball. The Angels and the Indians now lead them by a half a game and yet those teams have lost four out of every ten games they have played this season. Baseball is as much about losing as it is about winning; that’s why I love the game.

In six months, the Sox, like all the major league teams, have had only eighteen days when they weren’t playing a game. That’s less than a day off a week. The game requires they show up night after night, inning after inning, and pay attention to every ball and strike. After one hundred and fifty three games, they lead the Yankees because of the scores of two games. Two games. Life hinges on the details. There’s the big picture, the leagues standings, the playoffs and then there are the balls and strikes.

As October brings the baseball season to its glorious finish, so it will end our time here in Massachusetts. I long for the poetry of a Red Sox World Series Championship to send us on our way, but who knows. Lots of things have to fall in place for that to happen, just as lots of things need to fall in place, both big and small, for us to get out of town. Our timing is way off on needing to sell our house, which makes some of our other decisions hard to make. All we can do, for now, is show up everyday, just like the Sox, and take our swings.

Out of thirty major league teams, only nine have any real hope of making the playoffs, yet all thirty still have a week and a half of the season to play. Some of those games will figure into the final outcomes, but many will not. Yet, the Orioles and the Rangers will still play, and play hard. Beyond October glory, there’s something that matters about showing up and doing your job. (Yes, their ridiculous salaries make it easier to show up, I suppose, but the hope I find in baseball transcends the capitalism.)

I got to go to Fenway last week and was in the park when Big Papi hit a walkoff homerun to win the game. Two nights later, I watched him pop out in the same situation. Based on the Red Sox’ history and baseball in general, chances are I’ll get my heart broken again this October and will then start counting the days until Spring Training. It’s never over. It is, however, about baseball.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve not given up. We have a great team. I’m counting on them sending us off with a World Series win. And, whatever happens, I’m a lifelong citizen of Red Sox Nation.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There’s a new recipe.

skip the oj for breakfast

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

Gracie, our youngest Schnauzer, woke me up early this morning and I turned on the television as I was trying to gain consciousness just as all three morning shows were cranking up. The lead story on all of them was about O. J. Simpson. In fact, over half of the first thirty minutes of Today was about him. I kept watching, thinking they would actually tell me what was happening in the world sooner or later. No such luck.

I don’t care how much they talk about him, it’s not news.

Things are happening and they are things we don’t hear about, such as these stories I found on several international news outlets. These things actually matter and yet our media choose not to tell us much, if anything at all.

The situation in Darfur continues to deteriorate. For all the supportive rhetoric that has come from Western governments, the genocide continues.

The Israeli government has declared Gaza a “hostile area,” which could lead to Israel cutting off electricity and water to the region.

Severe floods all across Africa have devastated several countries, leaving many homeless, cut off, and threatened by disease.

There are also important things happening in Burma, Indonesia,
Cambodia, Nepal, and India.

How can we consider ourselves, as a nation, to be the world leader when we have no idea what is going on?

Peace,
Milton

ornithology

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
9

In our first summer
I started feeding birds –
you’ll have to feed
all year round,
our neighbor said,
or they’ll die in winter

I thought
I was doing them
a favor.

Now they congregate
in the crisp autumn air
and wait like worshippers
for me to fill the feeder
while the wild geese
fly overhead

I wonder
if both instincts
are true.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — You can check out other poems at Writer’s Island.

god is growing

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
7

Growing up Southern Baptist meant growing up with an image of a Very Male God.

Whatever images of God were given to me, one thing was always clear: God was He. Of course, Southern Baptists by no means had a monopoly on the pronoun, but the universe of faith I grew up in had no room for God to take on a new orbit. Somewhere along the way (college, I think), I came across a little book by J. B. Phillips called Your God is Too Small, which pushed me to think in some new ways, even though his images were exclusively male. One of my regular college exercises was rereading The Chronicles of Narnia. Two scenes, in particular, have stuck with me (though I can’t find the references just now). One is the warning in Dawn Treader that Aslan is “not a tame lion.” The other is Lucy meeting Aslan on the children’s return to Narnia and stepping back when she hugs him, startled that the lion is bigger than she remembers. “When you grow, I get bigger,” he tells her.

When Ginger started reading the passage from Luke 15 yesterday before her sermon, I was reminded of pivotal those parables have been in allowing my God to grow. I don’t remember when it happened, but I do remember the wonderful feeling of surprise and hope I felt when I realized Jesus was telling a story in which God was a woman: God, the tenacious housewife. (I know the parable doesn’t say anything about her being married, but that’s the way I understood the story at the time.)

The woman in the story was not one who had, as we say, disposable income. She had ten coins – the equivalent of ten day’s wages – and she lost one of them. Living on nine-tenths was not an option. She searched the house with a tenacity that grew out of desperation: she had to find the money. She moved furniture, tossed couch cushions, opened and reopened drawers. Nothing. Though the parable is short, I imagine the search was not. Who knows where she finally found the money. It was, I’m sure, as my mother always says, “in the last place she looked.” (Isn’t that always where you find something?) In that moment, her torment turned to joy and relief such that she spent the rest of the week’s grocery money throwing a party to celebrate finding the coin.

The parable is sandwiched between the story of a shepherd, also a social outcast and an odoriferous one at that, and a father. I realized in the sermons I had heard growing up that preachers said God is our shepherd and God is our father, but God was like a woman searching for a coin. But that’s not the way Jesus tells the story: God is a poor, desperate woman who is as relentless in celebrating what she found as she is searching for what she lost.

As I was rereading the passage this morning, I was struck by the verse that introduces the parables:

By this time a lot of men and women of doubtful reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently. The Pharisees and religion scholars were not pleased, not at all pleased. They growled, “He takes in sinners and eats meals with them, treating them like old friends.” Their grumbling triggered this story. (Luke 15:1-3, The Message)

If our God is too small then our image of humanity is diminutive as well. If God represents only power and might (by that I mean if our image of God is white and male), then only the powerful and mighty will matter. If we take the Incarnation seriously, then God is not only a shepherd, a poor woman, and a longing father, but God is also an undocumented immigrant, an AIDS patient, an insurgent, a gay man, a lesbian, a Darfurian refugee, a Katrina victim, a family farmer, a troubled teenager, and anyone else who doesn’t fit the description of a straight white male.

For the past six years I’ve been an hourly worker in restaurant kitchens. I’ve averaged bringing home around $20000 annually. Yet, when I walk into a store or a restaurant or pretty much anywhere, no one questions my right to be there. When I’m in downtown Boston, where public restrooms are hard to find, I can walk into the swankiest hotels and ask where the bathroom is and they tell me without assuming for a moment that I am not a guest. I don’t get followed around in stores to see if I’m going to try and steal something. I’m not held suspect because of my skin color or my accent. I have the run of the place because I’m The Man.

What I love most about these parables is Jesus’ message is clear: God is not The Man.

I used to get complaints from my English students because I wouldn’t let them use a male pronoun to stand for everyone. From time to time, they would argue from tradition. “It’s like the Declaration of Independence: all men are created equal.”

“You’ve made my point,” I would answer. “When they wrote those words, they meant all men, not all people. In fact, they meant all white men who own property.”

If we want our words to include everyone, we have to choose them carefully, which is not easy work. We have to expand our vocabulary intentionally. We have to teach ourselves to think and feel new things in order to effectively articulate the reality in which we live. So it is with our image of God.

By the end of Luke 15, everyone from the single sheep to the big brother has been invited to the party. Our untamed, unabashed, unfathomable God has invited everyone. including the people who make us squirm. “When you grow, I get bigger,” Aslan told Lucy. Perhaps God is saying to us, “I’m bigger; now you grow.”

Peace,
Milton

happy new year

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

One of my favorite images from scripture is that of God coming to walk through the garden each evening with Adam and Eve. There’s something about time being kept only by the rhythm of our steps that makes walking a sacred activity. Ginger and I walked our usual loop around the neighborhood yesterday afternoon, ending up on the beach since the tide was out. As we walked, we could see various sized footprints and paw prints in the sand, evidence of how others had marked their days. The tide has since come and gone, erasing those marks and preparing the beach for a new day, for new walks, for a new time.

Last night, we went to our friend Robin’s house to share in her Rosh Hashanah dinner. Ginger met Robin several years ago at the Interfaith Seder at Robin’s congregation and they became fast friends. Robin has been kind to include us in several of the Jewish holiday feasts along the way. We sat around a big table and Robin lighted the candles and those who knew the prayers said them together in Hebrew; Robin then repeated them in English. As we began to eat, each dish had significance both in taste and in shape. The round Challah, rather than braided, to represent wholeness and community. The bread was sweet and full of raisins. Sweet was the operative word for the meal: we ate apples dipped in honey, chicken soup with matzoth balls, chicken with a cranberry balsamic glaze, noodle kugel (that tasted of cinnamon), and tzimmes (slow-cooked carrots, sweet potatoes, and prunes). The meal finished with a multitude of wonderful desserts. As one web site noted:

The Holiday’s food reflects this pensive, contemplative and hopeful mood not only by using symbolic ingredients throughout the meal but also by avoiding others. Sweetness – which symbolizes hope for good things to come, is presented throughout Rosh Hashanah’s food. The main meal, which is eaten on R/H eve, always starts with either apple or a piece of challah dipped in honey. Any bitter or sour flavors are avoided.

Food is important in celebrations, I think, because it is both temporal and archetypal at the same time. We were eating dishes steeped in history and tradition and we were eating a meal prepared that day for that moment; the eternal and the fleeting share the same table. We sat around that table for almost four hours telling stories and sharing ourselves witih one another. It was truly a sweet evening. I sat next to a woman who was also a Gentile. Robin said she had invited herself to dinner when she heard it was Rosh Hashanah by saying, “I need a new year.”

Starting a new year in the fall fits the rhythm of life better than January. The harvest is in, the leaves are turning, and we are moving into a time of rest and anticipation. In New England, it will soon be time to plant the bulbs we want to see bloom in the spring, an important exercise in delayed gratification and, as E. B. White said, “calmly plotting the resurrection.” As we talked, laughed, and listened, I could feel the roots of our conversation reaching deep into a tradition and history that has known almost four thousand more new years than mine, a faith that has fed my own, and a way of marking time that starts with, “In the beginning, God . . .”

When we got home, I had one more walk to take. The pups were quick to remind me they had not made their daily trek to the water, so I grabbed the leashes and we trailed off into the moonless night. The tide was out and the beach was empty, so I let them off their leashes and they scattered off down the sand and quickly turned into shadows. I stood under the starlight sky, naming what stars I could, drinking in the Milky Way, and listening to the waves marking time as the encroaching tide prepared, once again, to erase our footprints and bring another new day, another new year. After a few minutes, I called their names and Lola and Gracie emerged from the darkness ready to go back home. As we walked, I heard Tom Waits singing in my ear:

and its time, time, time
and its time, time, time
and its time, time, time that you love
and its time, time, time

Peace,
Milton

who benefits?

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
7

The food we use at the restaurant comes from several different sources, most of which are local. Our oysters and mussels come right out of Cape Cod Bay. Our pasta provider makes it all just a few miles from us. Our produce company, though local, picks up the fruit and vegetables from the market in Boston, so, unfortunately, some of it is well traveled by the time it ends up in our walk in refrigerator. This past week, our tomatoes were Canadian and our spinach Californian. Most of our dry goods and some other hard to find things are brought by a huge national food distributor whose trucks, I’m sure, crowd the streets where you live as well. They bring everything from pizza boxes to tomato paste to anything else we ask for. For a price, of course.

Once or twice a year, the distributor has a food show where the merchants they represent set up tasting tables and work hard to show how they can make our lives easier. For the most part, the displays are piled with pre-made things designed to cut labor time and make us “look good” to the customer. With the right kind of budget, you could open a restaurant and only have to have a microwave, a warming oven, and a Fry-o-lator to get the food out. The clam strips are already breaded, the turtle cheesecakes are pre-sliced, the soups need only to be reheated, shrink-wrapped salmon filets, each one identical to the other, are ready to hit the pan and then topped with a pre-mixed sauce.

The experience was the foodservice equivalent of a shopping mall: once I stepped inside there was no identifying context. Regardless of where you live, once you walk into the mall and stroll between the Gap, Abercrombie, and Linens-N-Things, you are nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The shirts on the shelves in Seattle are the same as those in St. Louis. Send it to your cousin in Albuquerque and, if he doesn’t like it he can exchange it at the same store in the mall in his town.

The restaurant business these days, at most any level, is fascinated with “mini” or “baby” anything. Today I saw (and tasted) mini-éclairs, mini-quesadillas (rolled up in little cones), mini-hamburgers (one inch across), baby ravioli, and chicken cordon bleu bites. The buzz on the bite-sized products was they made good bar food. I suppose the vendors were right on some level: some of the stuff tasted pretty good and the convenience is not for nothing. But it wouldn’t be any fun to make or interesting to serve. What would I say: “Here, I warmed this up for you?”

Food has to have a soul. It is flavored by relationships and stories, not by convenience or ubiquity. Not that I haven’t eaten my fair share of drive-through (excuse me – drive thru). The people I met in the room were nice and appeared to care about what they were selling, and somehow it didn’t feel like food to me.

A number of years ago, a friend was taking a class on Shakespeare. The professor entered the room and wrote in large letters across the board, “Who benefits?” He went on to say the question was at the heart of every action and every character in the Bard’s plays. If you wanted to see where things were headed, ask the question of what is happening at the time. The question came to mind as I was approached with pre-packaged everything. When the discussion about the viability of a menu item centers on speed, price, and fashion, who benefits?

Speed, as a promise of progress, is deceptive. Faster, when it comes to food, is rarely an improvement. Instant anything pales in comparison to the real deal. Price finds its way into most any discussion. Perhaps cost is a better word. Prepared foods may be more cost-effective from a money standpoint, but what is the price of including phenodexelwhamalamadingdongzephedrine in my diet for no apparent reason other than convenience? Fashion, in any arena, usually has all the staying power of Dexy’s Midnight Runners. It’s one thing for a chef (or a person who likes to cook) to discover a dish or an ingredient and learn how to use it; it’s another thing for most every restaurant to add chipotle-something to their menu because we were all at the same food show.

When we were in Greece and Turkey last year we ate some amazing food. I bought cookbooks and learned how to make Pastitsio (Ginger’s favorite) and Imam Bayildi (my fave). I’m not sure how authentic my versions of these dishes have become, but they are full of memory and meaning for us and I’m really glad I can find it in the frozen food section at our supermarket. For most of the years we have lived in the Boston area, we have lamented the lack of good Mexican food. The reason for its absence was simple: there were very few Mexicans in the area. Over time that changed and we have a wonderful place that opened not far from where we live. The owner, Ezekiel, works hard to make good food and his staff – also Mexican, for the most part – greet everyone with a big “Hola, amigos” and a smile. I didn’t see him at the food show shopping for the “Santa Fe Quesadilla Bites.” I’m not sure he would have recognized them.

Then again, if he’d had a table of his homemade Pork Carnitas, he could have brought the whole show to a standstill.

Peace,
Milton

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