"when we came here today
we all felt something true
now i'm
red-eyed and blue"
wilco, "red-eyed and blue"
"deep in my heart
i know it's right...
i need to see you again
on the dark side
my friend
on the dark side..."
wilco, "far, far away"
the damndest little things'll kick yer ass deep right back into the long-ago, long-gone and far, far away, leaving you red-eyed and blue...
lauren and me, canning tomatoes in the kitchen on homestead ave, september 1997
i couldn't have felt any better as i pulled into the farmstand the middle of this just-passed afternoon. blue sky and sunshine as far as the eye could see. all the fixings for a late-summer barbecue waiting back in my kitchen: some cold spinach noodles dressed in a garlicky balsamic vinegarette already in the fridge; some top-shelf ground beef next to it, waiting for me to press it into patties. a red onion and a ripe homegrown tomato waiting to be sliced into burger toppings. a bag of rolls. far too many bottles of sierra nevada pale ale on ice in a cooler out on the back porch. i just needed to pick up some local corn-on-the-cob at the farmstand, and then head on home. my oldest son was at a friend's house, and the two little ones had just gone in for their naps. a couple of hours ahead of me with nothing to do but to sit out in the sun, shuck some corn, listen to some tunes, and just soak in the goodness of my position in life.
i took a big plastic bag from the rack and dropped the corn in. one ear, two ears, three ears, four...a dozen and a half, all told. i went to pay. the girl working the stand talked on a cellphone. i checked out their prices, and saw a sign a sign that kicked my ass back into the far, far away...
"u-pick...tomatoes...starts next weekend...$15 a bushel...minimum one bushel..."
and all of a sudden i got kicked all the way back into september 1997.
a year before, my eighty-six year old nana had come to our apartment for the day to teach me and lauren how to can tomatoes. as a kid, though we grew up as what i used to jokingly referred to as "landless peasants", in a little housing project, we always had a garden: my dad would always find a spot of land to rent off of someone, or he'd make some kind of deal, you know, give 'im rights to a little plot for the summer and he'd give ya some of the bounty in return. dad always grew a ton of tomatoes, and a bunch of other stuff as well; i remember me and my siblings pleading with my mother and my nana to please, please, please make the zucchini omelettes for dinner stop. but it's the tomatoes i remember most. as true as the jokes about endless zucchini ring, we seemed to have tomatoes coming out our ears, and i remember bringing bags of them to aunts and uncles and friends of the family.
what i remember most, though, is the sight of my mother and my nana canning those tomatoes, every weekend in september. two or three hundred quarts worth. they'd use them for months afterwards, on pizzas every friday night, and for sauce on the homemade fettucine noodles and cannolini and stuffed shells and lasagnas.
&&&&
i got married in july of 1994, and before long, i started learning how to cook. i loved making marinara sauce, and i figured it out soon enough, not much to it, really, but my efforts never quite tasted as good as the sauces of my childhood did. and somewhere along the way, i realized why: i realized i needed to can my own tomatoes. and so i got nana to come down one saturday in september of 1996 to show us how to do it.
like i said, she was eighty six years old at the time, but she still had all of her wits and most of her energy about her. she was absolutely thrilled that one of her grandchildren wanted to learn the old art of canning. we picked her up at her apartment and drove the half hour down to our place and she got right to work. she showed us how to parboil the tomatoes so that we could peel the skins off, how to core them, how to cook them down properly, how to sterilize the jars and the lids, how to fill the jars, how to screw the tops on just so, not too tight; you had to wait for the jars to cool properly before tightening them fully.
we made thirty two quarts that day. when we finished, she made us take her to a proper italian deli so she could get some provisions, the good stuff. in addition to the stuff she wanted to bring home for herself, she got some cappicola and sharp provolone and she brought it back to our place and made us some sandwiches. she had an ear-to-ear grin on her face the whole time. nana had a tempermental side, she was a strong-willed woman who'd survived raising five children as a widow and she survived the untimely death of one of those children. god forbid you got on her bad side, and since she practically lived with us as we grew up, all of us did find that bad side eventually. but that day we canned tomatoes with her, for that one day, i knew i was the favorite of her nineteen grandchildren.
&&&&
we went through those thirty-two quarts too damn quick that fall of '96, and we vowed to ramp up the production levels the next year. the week after labor day '97 we went down to the menands farmer's market looking to buy a few bushels of tomatoes.
no one seemed to have much in stock.
we got one bushel off a guy who seemed to sense our disappointment.
we told him how we'd learn to can the previous year, of how we wanted to do it big-time this year.
"well...i got more tomatoes than i can pick out on the farm. if you don't mind taking a drive, i'm out there a ways, it'll take ya a good forty minutes from here, but geez, i got tomatoes everywhere out there, you can pick 'em yourselves."
"how much?" i asked. i thought our enthusiasm might have marked us as suckers.
"i dunno...five dollars a bushel sound fair?"
oh yeah. even in 1997, five dollars a bushel for tomatoes fresh off a local farm seemed like a steal. he gave us directions and we told him we'd be out the next day.
"no obligation," he said. "but i hate to see 'em all go to waste..."
we had a puny old nissan sentra at that point, but we enlisted the help of our good friends in the upstairs apartment to take their bigger vehicle out to the farm with us the next day.
we got there around noon. a day much like today: blue skies, not a threat of rain, seasonable temperatures. he gave us a bunch of bushel baskets and we went to work. we picked as many bushels as we could fit in the car, i don't remember the exact number. i just remember that for the next week or so, we had bushels of tomatoes laying about the kitchen. we'd do some after we got home for work, and that next weekend, we canned all day. i remember laying in bed with lauren on the saturday night, the strains of wilco's "being there" drifting into our bedroom, the faint smell of tomatoes still in her hair, the faint smell of basil on her fingertips.
&&&&
and it all came back to me, out of nowhere, on an otherwise pleasant saturday afternoon, when i saw that sign at the farmer's stand today. fifteen dollars a bushel didn't seem like such a bargain, but then, five dollars a bushel wasn't yesterday. or was it?
&&&&
hard to believe that it's coming up on two years since lauren died.
"and those bright lights...i know it's right...deep in my heart...i know it's right..."
hard to believe it's been twelve years since those september days in that kitchen, in that bedroom. i always joked with her that the kitchen and the bedroom were my favorite rooms in the house. and now i'm not so fond of the bedroom, but much to my surprise, the kitchen brings me joy these days.
&&&&
and i feel, sometimes, like i am back in high school, back when everyone would ask me, where ya goin' ta college? whaddya gonna major in? whaddya wanna be when ya grow up?
i left work fifteen months ago, to gather my strength, to recover in some way, and mostly, to spend the time with our children, who were so, so young when they lost their mother.
and for awhile this summer, i put a lot of pressure on myself, trying to figure out what i wanted to be when i grew up into the next part of my life.
last month, my grief counselor asked me, so...what do you dream about? what do you want out of life now? where do you see yourself going?
i stammered, i hemmed, i hawed. and after some awkward silence, i had to tell him this: i don't see anything. i don't dream of the future any more. i don't believe in the future anymore.
he seemed mildly exasperated. he told me my homework, for our next session, was to think about the future.
i tried. i did.
but nothing came to mind.
i told him that when i thought of the future, all i saw was this: i saw myself sitting in an empty movie theatre, the lights dimmed. i saw a blank screen at the front of the room. i had the sense a movie was about to start, but it never did. no images made it on to the screen, no sounds came from the speakers. i just saw silence and a blank screen. i didn't see anything.
do we need the future?
or can we live on the now, and on yesterday? i seem to be living well on the now and on yesterday; am i kidding myself?
&&&&
you can't live in the past, the cliche says. maybe not. why not? the future may not even happen, so what is more real, the past or the future? the past is real, is it not? it happened, and it sits there in the mind's eye, random pieces of it resuscitated, brought back to life, by chance encounters with random signifiers, signs at a farmstand making 1997 seem far more real and far more alive than 2017.