An Onion in My Pocket

by Deborah Madison

  After the excitement of living in Cambridge, I couldn’t imagine going back to Davis so I transferred to the new UC campus, UC Santa Cruz, which had opened while I was away. Norman O. Brown was the campus hero, and a few professors whose classes I had sat in on at Harvard would be teaching there, so UCSC seemed like it would be an interesting place. Plus you had to love a school that chose the banana slug as its mascot.

  The low tuition made a California university a real possibility and I was ready to go back to school. I was ready to study.

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  Instead of living in a trailer on campus, I chose to live downtown, across from the boardwalk, in the second floor of a summer beach cabin. Everything about it was miniature. The little rooms had low ceilings, which I navigated in a slightly hunched-over posture. The kitchen had a tiny sink, a tinier stove, and a little table with two low chairs. This miniature house was directly across the street from the roller coaster and on weekends it trembled to the cascading fall of the train, the screams of the riders, and the whoosh of the wheels.

  A Portuguese couple lived on the ground floor. When both were home, they fought. With no insulation to muffle their shouting, they might as well have been in my rooms. Apparently when the husband, a fisherman, was away at sea, his wife was entertaining a lover. I was probably at the library during their trysts, but afraid that I might talk, she bought me off with mackerel when her husband returned. It’s really too bad that I wasn’t more interested in cooking because her bribes of fish offered a great opportunity, now that I look back on it—all that fresh fish and the wild fennel growing nearby. But I was studying hard and working; I knew no one; and I didn’t have a clue about what to do with a whole fish. I managed to cook many mackerel, but that was about it, managing.

  Mostly I got through college supping on little packets of soups, which could be found in Japanese markets. These perforated strips of dashi packets contained bits of freeze-dried scallions and fish cakes. Once you stirred them into hot water, they blossomed like those Chinese paper flowers encased in a smooth shell that you dropped into a glass of water. They probably weren’t terribly nutritious meals, but they provided a cheap way for a work-study student to feed herself, albeit rather minimally. Ramen was a heftier indulgence, but I scarcely remember eating in college, other than these thin soups and the occasional mackerel.

  Apparently something was happening somewhere, though, because to celebrate my graduation (with high honors, no less), in which Ravi Shankar and Alfred Hitchcock spoke to my class of one hundred students, I hosted a party for my family in the backyard of an actual house I had rented for my senior year, having bid goodbye to the roller-coaster apartment. I covered a huge platter with boiled crabs, asparagus, and artichokes and doused it all with lemon vinaigrette and fresh herbs. There was a crusty loaf of sourdough bread, and I made a big strawberry shortcake for dessert. It was a beautiful lunch and all of it came from nearby. The vegetable stands near Santa Cruz were the source of the berries and vegetables, lemons grew in the backyard, and crabs could be found down at the pier along with the bread. This was the first version of what has turned out to be one of my favorite things to make, what I call a platter salad, an ever-changing collection of foods in their season, usually diverse and always colorful, resting on a platter and covered with some sunny vinaigrette or salsa verde.

  I don’t know where the idea for this big platter meal came from. But my mother told me about something her mother used to do. “She sliced a round loaf of rye bread the wrong way [crosswise rather than lengthwise] so that she had large circles of bread, which she covered with softened cream cheese and then decorated geometrically with anchovy paste out of a tube, sliced green olives, pimentos cut in strips, and black caviar. Not only was she an excellent cook but she also played with food to make it beautiful.”

  I remember my mother doing something similar with tomato aspic, which she made in a French copper gratin dish, covered with a thinned mayonnaise to make, in effect, a canvas, which she decorated with delicate sprays of scallions, finely sliced rounds of carrot, black olives, and thin strips of peppers. While the salad I made was quite different from either of these, I thought that it showed a similar exuberance and sense of style that was somehow passed on to me from my ancestors. No one taught me to do what I did. It just happened, though it may, indirectly, have had something to do with Alan Chadwick and his amazing Biodynamic French Intensive garden on the hill above Cowell College.

  Alan Chadwick was an eccentric Englishman, a brilliant horticulturist, a student of Rudolf Steiner, a wild man, and the creator of the most beautiful gardens I have ever seen. He practically scared me away from gardening forever, though. When I finally went to see his garden, he flew at me from the opposite end of the acre plot, running and shaking his arms and screaming that I was stepping on one of the beds and to get off and get out! I knew enough about gardens, having been brought up by a gardener-botanist, not to do that, and I’m pretty sure that I hadn’t, but that’s how he saw it. I flew from this crazed man, fueled by fear and humiliation, and never dared to go back. (Many people talk about having had these kinds of experiences with Alan Chadwick, but not everyone had them.)

  However, the vegetables and flowers that grew in that garden were picked and placed in buckets by the bus stop for people to take home with them. I often slipped some edibles into my backpack before riding my motorcycle down to the beach cabin, where I cooked them to augment my soup packets. It wasn’t the flavor that struck me—their goodness was a given—as much as the appearance of that food and those flowers. Everything that emerged from that hillside acre was so vibrant and alive. It almost pained you to gaze on the buckets of dazzling blue delphiniums, the glow of shiny summer squash. You just couldn’t argue with their beauty, even if the gardener was a frightening being. Their clear, pure colors and forms completely seduced me. Sadly, I didn’t take advantage of what Alan Chadwick was teaching then, but gardening and cooking were not yet on my horizon. I was studying sociology and writing a thesis on trailer parks.

  I met up with Alan Chadwick years later under somewhat less intimidating circumstances, at Green Gulch, the farm owned by the San Francisco Zen Center. Alan came to live with us very early on to get a garden started. As a body, we combed the hillsides for cow patties, which became compost, but when 5:30 came and it was time for zazen, we abandoned the garden for the zendo. While a gorgeous garden was made, I think Alan despaired that we were not sufficiently sincere if we were just going to run off to meditate. He left for Covello, further north, and we continued to garden, but also to stop for zazen.

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  While I was still in high school, Cesar Chavez had organized the United Farm Workers. Even after the protracted Delano grape strike, tension over farmworkers and their lack of rights did not go away. One New Year’s Eve I marched in the cold with a group of Quakers in support of Chavez and the UFW. I marched because I was sympathetic and angry.

  When we lived in the country, just outside of Davis, the “bracero” program, which brought workers up from Mexico for seasonal fieldwork, was in place. About twenty braceros worked the tomato field across the road from us, and they ate their lunches in a grove of black walnut trees near our house. On Saturdays they put on clean clothes, walked the three miles into town to send their money back to their families, and walked back. They were shy, hardworking men and our family liked and admired them.

  During my senior year in college, someone organized a field trip to visit the farmworkers’ quarters on the farms in nearby Salinas, where so much of the country’s lettuce is grown. I looked at this so-called housing in dismay. The workers were given the meanest of hovels to live in, rooms that were no better than shacks, the only running water, if any, was from a hose that filled recently used pesticide containers. There were no latrines, no kitchens. In fact, I don’t think they were given these shacks—I think
they built them themselves from whatever materials they could find.

  I’ve always been a sucker for agricultural landscapes, having grown up in the Central Valley, which was pretty much agricultural. I especially loved the soft green vistas of all those lettuce fields in Salinas, as well as the fields of strawberries and artichokes nearby. These scenes, enveloped in fog and mist that softened all the edges, made it look beautiful rather than gritty. But after I’d seen firsthand, without that softening mist, the meanness with which the workers were “housed,” the prettiness of those scenes vanished and I could never look at them in the same way again, or look at lettuce in the store in the same way or, eventually, any mass-produced vegetable. This glimpse made a deep impression on me, which resurfaced years later when I found myself involved with food and farmers’ markets.

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  I moved to Berkeley after graduation from UC Santa Cruz, and befriended a young woman who showed up on my doorstep one rainy night with a note from a man I had met just once, a man who revolted me by eating raw chuck roast, which he carved off the bone with a knife. The note said I should welcome her. She was a French-speaking Anglo from Morocco, a Pied-Noir, and she moved in the night she arrived. That’s how we were in the sixties—ready and willing to open our doors to strangers. Who could turn away a wet person standing in the rain holding a damp piece of paper with an address written on it and an anxious look on her face? Maybe it was a gesture from the hippie era, but I’ve also been grateful for offers of rides or places to stay by strangers in France, Mexico, Japan, and other countries, none of them hippies or even young.

  At that time my postgraduate diet consisted pretty much of brown rice, yogurt, walnuts, and peanut butter. This was my austere and stingy period. But shortly before Evelyn arrived, something compelled me to buy a French, tin-lined omelet pan. Maybe with school out of the way I had come to a moment where I could pause, look around, and remember that it might be enjoyable to cook. Maybe I was ready to eat something else besides brown rice and peanut butter. Or perhaps it was just that the pan was a beautiful object. Whatever the reason, that pan was the first of many culinary acquisitions. I still use it on a regular basis.

  Being both French and Moroccan, Evelyn had certain basic expectations about food, plus she could cook. She found the contents of my refrigerator pathetic, but she could put my new pan to good use. After a while, to find something good to cook other than omelets, she went to Chinatown and bought whole fish, chickens, and vegetables. Evelyn also found chiles, coriander, cumin, cilantro, olive oil, and other foods that were new to me, and then she cooked. Our apartment took on a rich and spicy smell as Evelyn produced tagines and a battery of other Moroccan and French dishes. Had I been a food person at that time, I would have been all over her taking notes, asking questions, and trying to duplicate flavors and dishes. But I wasn’t. I was just thrilled that she was there introducing me to new things to eat. I cooked alongside her, but mostly I was focused on my new, first out-in-the-world job.

  My college degree had been in sociology and I wanted to be helpful in the world. I was attracted to city planning, an exciting new field at that time. I applied for a job at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but when I saw the lunchroom filled with people leaning on their elbows and wolfing down sandwiches at narrow little counters, I couldn’t imagine working there. Instead I got a job carrying out a study for a professor in the architecture department at UC Berkeley, where I felt much more at home. In Berkeley, I worked for that professor in urban studies for a year or so, which eventually brought me to Japan and, afterward, to San Francisco and that first sesshin at Sokoji.

  8. My Buddhist Family: Living and Eating Together

  A row of Victorian houses stood across the street from Sokoji, and Zen students lived in quite a few of them. I moved into one right after sesshin. Some students who lived in these old Bush Street houses were dockworkers; some were writers and poets; others had regular jobs downtown. One worked for Standard Oil. I got my first and only retail job, selling koi in the Japanese trade center a few blocks away. We were a diverse group of young people and it was a free and improvised time where each household figured out what it wanted to eat, whether it was vegetarian or not, whether shoes were left at the door or not, and the other little details of shared living. But details of living arrangements aside, we were all there because we wanted to be at Sokoji early in the morning to sit with Suzuki-roshi, the priest whom the Japanese congregation had brought over from Japan. It was the young Anglo students who wanted to sit zazen with him. He was a gentle and kind person. The American man who became the next abbot was hawklike in appearance, smart, and connected. He was the one who negotiated the purchase of Tassajara, Page Street, and Green Gulch and who had the vision for the Tassajara Bread Bakery and Greens.

  A few months after I moved into one of these apartments, the San Francisco Zen Center, which was funded by donations and the summer income from Tassajara, our guest-season resort and monastery, bought a large residential building across town on Page Street. As Sokoji had once been an Orthodox Jewish temple, 300 Page Street had been a home for young, single Jewish women who could experience chaperoned forays into the world, safely but apart from their parents. By 1970 there wasn’t much call for chaperoning young women anymore so the building was available and it was perfect for us. A lot of us had Jewish backgrounds, but we wanted more intentional lives than what our Jewish communities had offered when we were growing up. There was still a mezuzah on the door when we first acquired 300 Page Street. We moved in and quickly adopted a sleek black cat, whom we named Huey, for Huey Newton.

  Each of the fifty or so residents had a small room with a built-in dresser, a mirror, and a small closet, which seemed appropriately monastic, except for the mirror, which the more zealous students covered. The basement housed a library, the zendo where we practiced sitting meditation or zazen, and a “Goodwill,” where we swapped clothing with one another in lieu of shopping in stores. Above the basement, on the first floor, was a large kitchen and dining room, offices, a very funky student lounge, and the Buddha Hall, where services and ceremonies were held. Above that there were two floors of bedrooms and finally a rooftop that was a good place to go for a view and fresh air when the Zen life below became too much, as it sometimes did for me. Those of us who staffed the Zen Center received room, board, and small stipends. It wasn’t what we think of as making a living today, but taken together the room, board, and stipend were sufficient.

  Julia Morgan, the architect who is famed for having designed Hearst Castle and many beautiful buildings in Berkeley, also designed 300 Page Street. She endowed it with a feeling of amplitude, and nothing about it was cramped or stingy. The windows bore gentle curves, the halls were wide and generous, there was a lovely courtyard with a fountain and shrubbery. This was one of the most gracious buildings I have ever lived in.

  But there were questions about how to live as a group, such as how would we eat at Zen Center once we all moved in together. At first we ate anything and at any time of the day we chose. Then came Thanksgiving. One student, a nurse, was given a turkey by her hospital for the holiday. It was a gift and she shared with everyone. It was roasted in the kitchen and put out along with the brown rice, candied sweet potatoes, and other dishes on that day. Some students dug in, but a number took offense at seeing a turkey on the table. They felt that it was completely wrong for there to be meat in the building at all.

  “What about the Buddhist precept against taking lives?” they asked. “Aren’t Buddhists supposed to be vegetarian?” “Wasn’t the Buddha himself vegetarian?”

  Maybe.

  The way I saw it, recalling Alan Watts’s program on KPFA, begging was the way of the Buddha. His followers and Buddhist monks for generations thereafter offered their bowls for others to fill. Begging didn’t allow much room for picking and choosing. If meat went in, then it was eaten. You wou
ldn’t put your bowl out to be filled, then peer into it and say, “By the way, I don’t care to eat carbohydrates, or gluten, or meat.” Isn’t there a reason for that adage “Beggars can’t be choosers”? While this may have been inconvenient for anyone with strong dietary preferences, for a monk it would offer a rich opportunity to become free of the dualistic this-not-that thinking that normally fills our lives. Maybe begging could help us step outside the difficulties that come with the separation of self and other and help us to be at one with the world.

  “What did the Zen monk say to the hot dog vendor?” “Make me one with everything!”

  Sure, the monk was buying the hot dog, not begging for it, but even in this joke the monk leaves it up to the vendor to decide what everything is, at least as it pertains to the hot dog.

  Years later in Venice, Italy, I was struck by a beggar I passed daily for a period of time, a man who knelt on the stone street, his body upright, hands outstretched, eyes cast down. His was not a soft, sinking-on-the-ground-comfortable kind of kneeling, or a lively standing posture, but a far more energized upright posture. I suspected it was hard on the knees, as well as the back and outstretched arms. This could not have been a comfortable pose to sustain. With eyes lowered, the beggar wasn’t even relieved by the entertainment of watching people passing by. Should you give such a supplicant money, you weren’t rewarded with a glance or a cheerful “God bless you, have a nice day!” or even a nod. What you gave and how you felt about it were entirely your business, not his. His immobility helped you see what your own expectations might be when you offered a coin, which might be more difficult than being the one begging.