by Chris Martin
Hello. I just wanted to say that this morning I was sitting at the breakfast table when Frank – my husband – comes in and sits down. I still had my tea. Tea my daughter Maureen sent me. She calls it green tea, but it has bits of Rice Krispy in it. I know, huh? I must say it turned out to be pretty darn good.
So Frank, he drops into his chair as normal, still reading his magazine from the bathroom, and reaches over and without looking up pinches away the end piece, just a bit of crust really, of toast. From my plate. Crumbs fall in a line from my little plate to his chair. A rabbit could follow it. I saw the whole thing, but my mind was elsewhere.
This happens with him. It’s his way of saying “I see you sitting there staring into space.” Even though: he won’t drag his eyes up from his article. Not involving himself in the necessary social interaction such a comment really needs.
And you can just sense – well, I can sense, but it’s pretty obvious – you can just sense with the way he raises his eyebrows and pinches that corner with those fingers of his, that he isn’t really reading when he's pinching. Because when his hand comes back with whatever it is he’s helped himself to, you can see his eyebrows relax back into position. Then he’s reading. First he's reading, then he's pretending to read but not saying hello or I’m hungry – then stealing – then reading again.
That is the morning conversation.
You can guess I prefer just thinking my thoughts with company like that.
Well, so what? you say. Fine. Just let me finish.
So I decide it’s not worth it to get up and fix him some toast. He’ll manage. He’ll probably go to the clubhouse later, I think, because his friend Max will be there for lunch because Max likes the French Dip on Thursdays and Frank just goes to talk politics, be with the boys.
Well, the French Dip then makes me think of slices of roast beef and the juice they give you in the cup. And naturally I think: that juice they give you is like liquid beef. It is. Not ground-into-pulp liquid beef. Not squeegeed beef, but I mean = liquid beef. Like the commercial says, the very essence. Yes that's right, I agree: the very essence. You don’t need the texture of the meat, because there in front of you is the beef. As a liquid. And it comes to me of course as spring follows winter that: people are going to be eating food like this in years to come. We all just need the nutrients and the tastes but the actual structure of the foods is not you know so important than if you can just have a cup of chicken or right: a squirt of pie.
Is this a good thing? I can’t tell. What I do know is that I like on movies and tv when someone in a far off galaxy – a human, right? – on a space ship – or even here at home – on our Planet Earth – pushes a square button on the wall and a panel you haven’t noticed before slides up and there you are: the meal of the day. In a cup, or maybe if it’s polite, the cup sits on a saucer. Or maybe the food is pink and square on a white plate next to a green ball. Lettuce and tomato. I get it.
But again, I think, is this a good thing? Food comes from the earth. My father rest his soul was a greengrocer’s and before that his father drove wagons from the farms into town. The guys who delivered every morning came in with dirty boots and dewy aprons. Some of them quite attractive. At least that’s how I remember it. And yet here we are now at the point where we can make whatever is or was the cow into a liquid that is or was him, the cow. I honestly can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not. Because it’s pretty smart of someone to go through all the trouble of figuring out how to do that and we shouldn’t say no to having people investigate new ways of doing things. That would be unethical and not good for society, right?
Now, the reason I’m on this, you know, track of reasoning is from this night out with my daughter Maureen the other night. And that she writes her own blog as she calls it about what she eats and where. Making a small name for herself and maybe meeting boys too. The girls today are free to be as crafty as the boys. I said craFFty. Any way, this very nice boy she brought with – his name was Jimmy, thank god, as in you know, a little Irish – the entire night he, the two of them spent talking about science. Such as, taking little bits of DNA from this that or the other thing and putting it to use somewhere else. A little here, put in a thing over there, is what I understood. I don't even think Frank was listening.
Now, do I think that’s good? I don’t know. I know I should, you know, be up on things, form opinions. But come on. I’m sixty-three years old. People smarter than I think this is the way to go. But I’ll eat soup, thank you very much, if everything’s going to be liquid. I don’t have to experience the wonder of somebody in a white coat taking a perfectly good living farm animal, whirl it up and separate it into molecules and then rearrange those molecules like beads on a string and voila! Your beef, hooves and all, is a rose. A real rose. That you snip from a branch. Because I have heard that that’s what they can do, in order to make the rose, I don't know, stronger? Strong like a cow? Well yes, excuse me, but they are doing that, at the very least thinking about it. Maybe not a rose because you don’t eat roses. But a cow, made into a pink flower, sitting on top of a green branch made out of I don’t know seaweed or maybe paper which probably wouldn’t have any taste any way, and if it did, it would definitely be sugar free to keep the bugs away? So ok: that would be impressive.
Any way, to continue: this is all going through my head at breakfast. It’s just like us, I decide, to try to convert a cow into its liquid form. In the laboratories. Because doing such a thing, it seems to me, and I was thinking this so help me God when Frank came in from his you know "morning elimination," I was thinking: if you look at where we are now and where we’ve been – first refrigeration, then instant noodles then Tang – remember Tang? – then of course, just listen: liquid cows. That's what's next. Because it is all part of the entire effort to blast into space and leave this planet behind. It’s clear to me. You can look back and see it all come to this.
And when we do blast off, we can’t take cows with us. What good would a cow in space or for that matter on another planet do? It’s almost like kidnapping, which unfortunately did make me smile a little on behalf of the poor cow wondering where the hell it’s being taken to and why, peeling past Saturn. But it's because we’ll want to have something cow-like, something to remember it by. It would make a body homesick for his planet when he should be piloting the space craft. Converting a cow into liquid is a lot less trouble in upkeep than having it in its four-legged version, you know – pardon the image – piling onto the white tile of the spaceship. Its hooves would probably not keep it upright on that kind of floor anyway. It’s like ice.
So that’s why I’m very quiet with Frank this morning. I don’t tell him anything: don’t touch my toast, or nicely, do you want your own? Because I’m sitting there, admittedly riveted with myself. As my daughter says, in my head. And still in my gown. Not realizing the tea’s got cold. Struck that we, the human race, all of us, are unconsciously working like demons, fighting wars, building skyscrapers, digging, I don't know, canals, just to .... well, in fact, I had this image of breaking out of the earth like you would from an egg. From the inside. Only, with a tremendous explosion. Fire with rocks and debris flying into the heavens with a bright powerful light pouring out of the center of the cracked open earth. Maybe we are supposed to go through all this trouble learning things, breaking things, cluttering everything up and then just like that rocketing off to distant planets without cows or butter or ants or flowers, hopefully bringing some of them with us, but I know, not all of them. Just leaving the earth behind like a messed up, stinking crib. The worse feeling.
So then I look at my husband. He was still reading his magazine. After all that. I felt like I just woke up. I mean, whew! And me, still sitting in my gown, not made up, at the table, with a plate of crumbs and my cold tea, and across from me, my husband, Frank. Who is now beyond pretending not to look, as if I don't exist. Just blissfully ignorant.
And yet here am I, sitting in my safflower kitchen on a cloudy spring
day, an oldish, if you like, woman in a retirement village in a duplex which if you look down from on high it has a roof and a little white patio like all the others – if you just picked up that roof and saw tiny me sitting at my kitchen table with my tiny gnarly husband sitting with me there, you still wouldn’t have any idea what I was just thinking.
Which got me to wonder what I must look like. Its a bad habit, but I’ll sometimes put myself in Frank’s place for a moment and pretend to look at me staring off into space, thinking god knows what. It's a bad habit that always gets me to go leave the table at a restaurant or even in my own kitchen and take a look at myself, beauty-wise. But today I decided, well, why, if I was busy self-examining myself thinking these things, then why couldn’t I just put all these thoughts into him and watch him go through it himself and I watch him, step by step: first the French Dip, then the liquid beef, the meatflowers, breaking out of the egg, zooming off into space, so many thousands of years in the future that we, us two, myself and Frank and you, and everyone we know and their generations times ten, would be forgotten dust in the hooves of the cows rendered into liquid for the benefit of space travelers. Who maybe won’t even look like us? Right: he probably wouldn't bother at all.
Well any way, you had to be there. It seemed funnier when I sat there pretending Frank was thinking all this.
Peggy Anne Sullivan
Naples, FL
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