The Edible Gourmand

You’re masked and fogged, walking a tiny cart around the gourmet grocery store. You’re looking for delicious vegetables you haven’t tried yet and Loblaws, because of the pandemic, is fresh out of jicama and just about everything. But here . . . $5 baby Chinese eggplants! Pico broccolinitinietti! $7 for a bunch the size of a sprig of dill! You bought some of these things last week. You roasted them in the oven. You forgot about them and now they droop over the edges of the shelves in your refrigerator like the clocks in a Salvador Dali painting.

Pasta for the passing punster.

There is a Great Wall of pasta beyond the vegetable section. Different shapes of pasta you haven’t tried yet! Made from durum wheat which is . . . google . . . a tetraploid species of wheat . . . whatever. You spot one that looks like the tubey pasta you once ate with bolognese sauce at a lovely restaurant which has closed because of the pandemic, but it gives you a few happy memories, so you bring it home.

The label says it is ‘ziti.’ To the right is a picture of what it looks like bubbling away in the pot. The one you love comes by and calls it pea-shooteretti. It takes a full 12 minutes for the pasta become even slightly al dented and, drained and resting in the colander, it resembles the inner tubes from a tiny bicycle.

Here’s where things get worse. You have crafted a sauce of sauteed, chopped eggplant mixed with black diced olives cooked in a chunky tomato base. You pour it generously over the pasta. The two of you decide to eat dinner while watching an old episode of The Wire and settle into your matching La-Z-Boys, steaming bowls in hand. A few minutes go by. Perhaps inspired by the carnage in front of him, your loved one looks down at his dinner and declares ‘it looks like a bowl of guts.’ He finds this amusing. You try to finish your meal. The next day, increasingly pleased with himself, he says the remains you heaved last night in a fit into the compost as, ‘wow, now it looks like someone was disembowelled.’ You write a blog that will, you hope, embarrass him. No chance. He has forgotten all about it and is happily wondering what’s on the menu for dinner tonight. You think you’ll surprise him.

Covid Haiku

Masked, I leave the house

How can breathing make my nose

Oleaginous?

We used to say we fed

On air, our love sufficing.

Give me that bagel.

Tsunami sends me

Tides of zombie images

Netflix night again.

Masked, you frown at me

As we pass on the sidewalk

Good morning mother!

Let's watch some Covid

We say, laughing, and switch on

Not so funny now.

The COVID Cedarvale Search Team

ESCAPED: one hearing aid, Cedarvale Park, Toronto.

You can certainly say I deserved to lose my hearing aid in Cedarvale Park yesterday, given how deaf I have clearly been (see below) to the Covid-19 pandemic. And you can say I deserved to lose the hearing aid, an over-the-ear device, because of Covid-19. That’s because I wear a mask every time we take a walk, a mask I bought for two bucks from the local corner store from their stash under the counter. For black-market mask-buying I deserve what happened, which is that I unlooped the mask from behind my ears a few times and during one of them my hearing aid must have unlooped itself from my earlobe and flung itself into the grass, crawling free along the pathway like a tiny robotic snail.

Hearing aids, like jewelry, belong to that group of possessions that combines terribly expensive and terribly small, the result for absentminded idiots like me of setting money on fire. My collection includes a diamond stud at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, an anniversary ring (recently found after I moved the sofa) and a cameo brooch. I have lost three star-of-David necklaces, which can only be anti-semitic.

This particular hearing aid is — was — made for such people, because it works through an app on my iPhone that monitors its whereabouts and turns the hearing aid into the perfect earbud. Listening to it, I’ve giggled my way through dental surgery listening to funny podcasts, and snoozed to Headspace sleep stories. “Come visit the guests at the Pooch Palace. Daisy the whippet joins you on the lobby sofa and lays her head on your knee. She will be here all night if you should need her.”)

So the app on my iPhone is programmed to find the hearing aid if I lose the actual device. Of course I hadn’t connected the hearing aid to the app in ages, but Jonathan held my iPhone in front of him like a Geiger counter to activate the signal and it told us the hearing aid might be at a certain point on the pathway next to the street. Wearing our Covid masks, we walked slowly, in a serpentine fashion, with our heads down in deep focus. We eventually attracted attention even from the depressed eyes-averting black-market mask-wearing dog-draggers in the park. Several of them shouted at us whether they could help. One man asked where we had already walked. We told him we had started at the far end of the park. He said he had nothing better to do these days and headed off towards the west.

We discovered five minutes later that the signal wasn’t really working. The hearing aid was still at liberty. We thanked everyone and went home. I reported the loss to my hearing-aid company, which told me it’s closed until the end of the pandemic. I’m still deaf. The man with nothing better to do is, for all I know, still walking.

Contortiavirus

The Coronavirus workout, courtesy of my gym.

I promise you, in three years the coronavirus infodemic, as the World Health Organization calls it, will be a jokey meme, another example—like gas shortages in the 1970s, or Gangnam Style—that obsessed people and the media for a while and then blew itself out. I went to the gym to work out after 10 days away and hand-sanitizer stands were everywhere: at the entrance, at the door to downstairs, at the fitness desk, and posted every ten feet in the weight room like tiki torches.

The gym itself, of course, was half empty, which was terrific, because those little blue foam squares I use to support my tush are usually clutched by yoga enthusiasts and hard to come by. Those who were there, however, were working out in novel and extraordinary ways: scrubbing down the hand weights with paper towels, pushing weight levers with their elbows, and contorting their bodies in acrobatic ways to avoid touching anything they didn’t have to.

I promise you, in three years the coronavirus infodemic, as the World Health Organization calls it, will be a jokey meme. I hope.

Rage against the Machine

An early engraved imagining of the Cideville poltergeist. Note the pets on the ceiling.

I promised to tell you what the poltergeist is in my new audiobook, The Priest, the Witch & the Poltergeist. Most historical poltergeists described in Rupert Mathews' book Poltergeists (thanks to Living Library) share a common and somewhat quotidian set of characteristics:

They begin with slight sounds, usually a scratching noise. (Excellent way for kitchen staff to explain the persistence of rodents). 

Knocking on wood or glass (big rodents).

Moving objects (the poltergeist has been working out).

The appearance and disappearance of things (common with older spirits who have forgotten where they left their keys.)

Communication, often through knocking. (Most often met with reactions of Shut up! Shut up! Shut UUUUp! and lalalalala with fingers in the ears.)

Wet spots that smell like urine. (It is a scary situation.)

An actual photograph of Paris barricades made during the 1848 revolution (see Les Misérables for a more lyrical construction).

There is one intriguing and nonreligious hypothesis for why a poltergeist visits a household. Is someone living there older than 10 but under the age of 16? Psychologists and their antecedents, doctors of physick, proposed that the tremendous upheaval of hormones and sinew and blood that torments children at the inception of adolescence can manifest in a disturbance in the home. (Modern parallels include repeated slamming of the door to an upstairs bedroom and, paradoxically, days of silence at the dinner table.)

The real French poltergeist I described in The Priest, the Witch & the Poltergeist began in 1849 and continued into 1850. One witness at trial, the priest of a neighbouring village, testified: "I took every precaution in listening to [the sounds], even placing myself under the table to make sure that the children could do nothing, and yet I heard noises, which seemed to me, however, to come more especially from the wainscot. I said in connection with this that the noises seemed to me so extraordinary I would vouch for them with my blood."

I wondered what else was happening in Europe at mid-19th century. Revolutions in France, Germany, Austria and Italy, as well as dozens in smaller states. A time of upheaval. An explosion of inventions: revolvers, propellers, early lawn mowers, passenger railways, the telegraph, sewing machines. A time of upheaval, a time of growing noise. Cacophony.

That's when I decided. My poltergeist would make knocks like any decent Doppelganger, but with taps of Morse Code and the whirr of helicopter blades: an auditory Luddite raging against the machinery of its time up to the technology of the current day. In the audiobook The Priest, the Witch & the Poltergeist, there are over a dozen carefully crafted spooky sounds that have come to haunt us—or what is worse, that we have grown to think are normal. (Like a leaf-blower.)  Get yourself the newly released audiobook, enjoy the story and see if you too can figure out what the poltergeist noises are.

How to train your own poltergeist

The Priest, the Witch & the Poltergeist was based on a true story, but it was going to be a print book, so I didn’t have to think about what a poltergeist really sounded like.

Let me explain the true story part.

In 1850 in the rural town of Cideville, France, strange noises began to erupt in the parsonage where a priest lived with his housekeeper and two boys. The priest was certain the noises were caused by a local male witch and shepherd who had muttered some kind of threat to the boys at a local auction. The priest forced the witch to apologize to the boys. The noises got worse. He brought in another priest and performed an exorcism. The noises got worse — and notorious: a marquis from Paris came to Cideville to talk to the now-famous poltergeist. The priest, driven somewhat mad, attacked the witch, beating him half to death. You want a hex? cried the witch. I’m suing you for assault. What followed in the spring is the only known witch trial where a witch was the plaintiff.

When the print version of The Priest, the Witch & the Poltergeist was published some years ago it received very good reviews but didn’t sell much. Then audiobooks came along and grew hugely popular. Anybody can read a story aloud for Audible.com. Booktrack Inc. put together a wonderful audiobook narrated by actor Jeremy Domingo. But even they couldn’t construct a poltergeist.

The strangest true story, plus sound. www.audible.com

What sounds would you use? How would you change them? In the original, true story the priest ordered locals to nail the walls of his parsonage because the marquis told him the poltergeist was afraid of nails. What would that sound like? I got my husband and daughters to bang blocks against the walls of our home until they were exhausted and a pair of candles on the dining room table snuffed out. It wasn’t good enough. Mainly because I had to figure out: What was this poltergeist trying to say?

I’ll tell you next time what it decided to say to me.

Making my resolutions more realistic

I resolve to . . . 

. . . hold on to the dresser when putting on my pants.

Check the flue before lighting a fire.

. . . wear those elbow-length gloves when pruning a rosebush.

. . . stop calling 911 after gardening and take care of it myself.

. . . check the flue before lighting a fire.

. . . understand the printing on the top of a ladder that says DO NOT STAND ON THIS STEP really means something.

. . . stop pretending nobody hears the outcome of eating lentil soup.

. . . write down the address of a party instead of ringing all the neighbours' doorbells to ask if they're hosting anything.

. . . jamming the car into a SMALL CARS ONLY parking space so climbing in through the passenger side is the only option.

. . . pick a side when hugging guests and stick with it.

. . . carry a first-aid kit at all times.

Greetings. We are your guides to a successful knee replacement

THE DECISION 

Your surgeon

We’ve been through so much together. Synovial fluid shots! Platelet-rich plasma shots! Stem cell shots! Your knee is a Mount Everest upon which I, your personal private-care sherpa, have driven the stakes of my reputation and littered paid invoices for my children's private-school tuition. Remember me extracting stem cells from the base of your spine while we talked about kitchen renovations? Thanks to you mine are almost done. Remember the morning I drained half a cup of fluid from your Baker's cyst? That was interesting. One visit we spent twenty minutes looking for a new injection site for corticosteroid that reminded me of my student days at the free clinic downtown. Years of memories.

But if you're fed up, I suppose we can give you a knee replacement. Here's the binder of information from the hospital. See you in six months.

Your knee

Sorry. Did my best. 

Your massage therapist

Yeah, it’s a bummer. I look at it as you leaving the winding leafy trail of cartilage convergence, but I’m okay with it. I’m okay with just about everything. It’s the weed, but it’s also my philosophy that our paths in life are different. Let me say goodbye to your patella before you go.

Your family doctor 

I'm going to warn you of all the reasons why you shouldn't get a knee replacement before you do it. That’s just my medical school training. When I hear the words 'knee replacement’ my brain flips to the page on complications. I know I suggested you get one four months ago, but you said you wanted to avoid it, so my brain flipped to the page on why you should. Pavlovian. Can’t help it. Like me mentioning our Enjoy Your Aging Process clinic every time you come in for a visit. 

POST SURGERY

Your knee

What the hell?

Your medical team

Sit up. Get off that hospital bed. Join us for the group foxtrot in the hallway at 5 p.m. Thanks to the latest research our treatment plan involves deliberately breaking down your body’s attempt to form scar tissue in order to ensure the best long-term flexibility. THE FIRST THREE WEEKS ARE CRITICAL. You can count on us telling you you’re not doing enough, you are resting too much, you're not resting enough, take these iron pills, this codeine and you may need this laxative. You’ll thank us eventually. Buy some apples. 

Your physiotherapist

Wow, that scar is impressive. Walk around for me using this walker. You look a bit like a chicken, did you know that? One of my clients is playing tennis six weeks after surgery. Another just finished the New York Marathon. I’m sure we’ll whip you into shape. You’re my poster child for physiotherapy.

Your doctor

Let me take the metal staples on your knee out with this pair of Costco scissors. Here's your prescription for extra-strength Tylenol. 

Your physiotherapist

Good morning. We've devised a new exercise for you making your way through this model of Valley Forge we set up in the training room. 

Your reality check

Government health care. This waiting room has in it a man with Parkinson's, a 34-year-old man with autism being comforted by his aging parents, and a schizophrenic talking to the posters on the walls. They all need knee replacements too.

I should get out more.

Your friends

I will bring cookies from the Harbord Bakery.

I will bring hot French fries from the bistro down the street.

Here's a podcast on Dolly Parton that might amuse you.

Let me put these dishes in the dishwasher. Don't get up.