of emptiness, of fullness perfectly contained

One week into The Post and I’m already behind. Insert comment on Miriam-lateness here.

Ok, here’s a real-life conversation from last week…

Me: I was supposed to be born in mid-October, so I was a few days early.

Allison: You? Early?! I guess it happened that one time aaaand it’s never happened since! (buh dum chh)

I didn’t post on Monday, as promised, because I was sick and still went to work. Bad move. I’m paying for it now. I dragged myself to a clinic this afternoon to find out what's wrong (I've been sick three times in four weeks; turns out I have a sinus infection and an ear infection) and then I went on a quest for the ultimate medicine: Matzah ball soup.

Whenever I'm sick, all I want is chicken soup. My dad sent me a bunch of Hanukkah presents last month, including a gift card for a delicatessen in Tenleytown, so I managed to get carry-out today. I cashed in big-time--two containers of matzah ball soup, a turkey melt, an everything bagel, blintzes, rugelach, and a Dr. Brown’s cream soda. Now I have enough food to last me through the weekend--and hopefully through this illness.

So my question for you is: What are your favorite comfort foods??! And why? (This seems like the kind of question my roommate would like. She's moving out tomorrow and it’s going to get lonely around here!!)

My comfort foods are:

*Mom’s chicken soup with acini di pepe

*Mom’s polenta with spicy Italian sausage

*Mom’s roast beef and mashed potatoes

*Mom’s cornbread and Irish soda bread

*Mom’s oatmeal (notice a trend here?)

*Chinese food--onion pancakes, rou chuan, guan guan mien from Tai Dong, etc.

*And of course, kreplach or matzah ball soup

Comfort foods remind us of where we're from... So what are your favorites?

This poem has been one of my favorites since Mrs. Greenbaum’s Advanced Writing class senior year. It was a great class--probably my favorite at Groves. We wrote a lot. We read a lot--both poetry and prose--and I knew I loved Mrs. Greenbaum when we read a short story by Charlie Baxter, who was my mom’s professor in college. Emily, Caitlyn, Kate, and I were in the class together, which gives me the warm fuzzies because Caitlyn and I had brunch in Woodley last week, and almost exactly a year ago, Emily and I were in Southeast Asia.

I like the simplicity of this poem and how everyday it is--like a snapshot out of Alan Dugan’s life. It makes me think of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and of being in New York--one of the places I'm from, in a way.

And most of all, as a perpetually-late Libra, I like the imperfect metaphor of perfect balance.

Closing Time at the Second Avenue Deli
--Alan Dugan
This is the time of night at the delicatessen
when the manager is balancing
a nearly empty ketchup bottle
upside-down on a nearly full ketchup bottle
and spreading his hands slowly away
from the perfect balance like shall I say
a priest blessing the balance, the achievement
of perfect emptiness, of perfect fullness? No,
this is a kosher delicatessen. The manager
is not like. He is not like a priest,
he is not even like a rabbi, he
is not like anyone else except the manager
as he turns to watch the waitress
discussing the lamb stew with my wife,
how most people eat the whole thing,
they don’t take it home in a container,
as she mops up the tables, as the
cashier shall I say balances out? No. The computer does all that. This
is not the time for metaphors. This is the time
to turn out the lights, and yes,
imagine it, those two ketchup bottles
will stand there all night long
as acrobatic metaphors of balance,
of emptiness, of fullness perfectly contained,
of any metaphor you wish unless
the manager snaps his fingers at the door,
goes back, and separates them for the night
from that unnatural balance, and the store goes dark
as my wife says we should take a cab
or walk, the stew is starting to drip already.
Shall I say that the container can not
contain the thing contained anymore? No.
Just that the lamb stew is leaking all across town
in one place: it is leaking on the floor of the taxi-cab,
and that somebody is going to pay for this ride.