Where We have Been, Where We are Going

I've been writing for this blog for about a quarter of a year now, and feel it's time to take a breather and to reflect on the work so far and on how it ought to proceed. First of all, a thank-you to all my readers, regular and irregular, nearby and far away. It humbles and inspires me (really) to think that people, and especially people who do not immediately know me, see enough in my work to give it the gift of their time, to read it and maybe discover some angle of insight that they otherwise would not have known existed, or find in it some inspiration to do something they might not otherwise have done. I trust that at least at times we have connected. That's the important thing here. As the novelist E.M Forster said, "Only connect. Only connect."

But there's still so much to do! So many ways in which the blog could be improved, particularly I think in terms of sharpness of focus and steadiness of mission. At times over the past few months, working on these posts--saying to myself "what's this blog really about, what am I trying to do?"--I've felt a bit like a man waking up out of a drugged sleep, and coming to consciousness in the bowels of a mysterious sailing ship. He looks at his shoulders and sees the gold epaulets and knows he is supposed to be the captain. But what sort of vessel is he on? What is it carrying? What are its ports of call and final destination? Only bit by bit does the evidence present itself, although eventually, painstakingly, his mission and his methods do make themselves known. 

And maybe that's where I am now. I've spent several months now feeling out the parameters of my mission, tallying up my resources, learning the ropes of the scheduled blogger's routine. I feel much more nimbly in command. I'm ready to proceed.

Coming up now are four brief points. Brief point one and brief point two concern themselves with 9-Volt Nomad's mission, brief point three with 9-Volt Nomad's methods, and brief point four with motivations for the project. So: mission, mission, methods, motivation.

Mission One: Defining the Sustainable Lifestyle

This is the most important work of the blog. I want to define and describe a lifestyle that, without wishful thinking and in all dimensions of experience--from the psychological to the ecological--can truly be called "sustainable." A lifestyle meaningful and rich, yet one that when multiplied by billions of other human lives lived much the same way, would not impossibly strain the planet's living systems.

Some caveats and provisos here, especially for those who believe that technology and public policy alone can usher in the age of sustainability: I don't agree. I believe that, when it comes to this great labor, garden-spades and cheesecloth will prove more important than this or that subsidy for solar panels or wind turbines, the actual flexing of the individual human hand more powerful than the fantasies and fortune of Elon Musk. We can't manufacture our way out of a manufactured mess. We can't consume our way out of the trap of consumption. 

Mission Two: Discovering Joy

Of course sometimes sacrifice is just sacrifice, and costs just honest costs. Still, let's never count out the possibility that, even as we strip the motto "more stuff, more power" from our lives, we gain a great deal. Giving up certain material expectations and setting aside fantasies of technological control can amount to a surprise investment in sanity, community, and inner humanity: real civilization, in other words. Simply put, living green doesn't have to mean living the melancholy blues.

But first we have to take up the challenge, or at least see someone who has done so, and hear their stories and reassurances! If you have not yet learned to cook, how can you know the pleasures of being self-reliant in that way? Or if you've never shared your tools with a neighbor, how can you really know how your sharing will cultivate a sense of community? So I intend as much as possible to use myself and my home Sunny-side as illustration; not because I have achieved the perfect lifestyle--not at all!--but because we at Sunny-side are trying to move that direction one do-able leap at a time, and because I want our work and the blessings we discover in it to serve as the reassurance that people need. Then readers might just decide such a venture is possible and make a leap or two themselves. 

Regarding Methods: Consulting my Past and my Life Abroad

As it happens I grew up in India and New Guinea, and I want to make use of that fact in my posts. Those were more elemental times and places. So much more was done by hand, and there was so much more of a sense of time spent slowly on the earth. And since I believe the human future belongs to the human hand and the earthly elements, well then my memories of those times and places may well speak to how it might feel to move that direction again; the how-to's involved in that project as well as the rewards. Also, if such memories are honest, they may serve to inoculate me and my readers against impractical idealism and foolish mis-estimation. Not everything was perfect back then and over there. Not hardly, as they say here in Indiana. 

And here I can't leave out my mother, and my memories of growing up under the influence of her strong character. She was a woman who wanted food for the hungry, justice for the poor, and competence in cooking and cleaning for everyone, including her sons. She hated waste of any kind and had a deep sense of the value of the domestic arts. It made her impatient to think that anyone would not know how to fry up an onion, or would think themselves too good for the job of brushing out a toilet. If you follow this blog, you will learn more of her, guaranteed.


So: 

• 9-Volt Nomad is about defining "sustainable." Honestly. Without wishful thinking. 
• 9-Volt Nomad is about discovering joy.
• 9-Volt Nomad seeks in past times and even foreign places a guide for us here in the difficult present.

Finally, Regarding Motivation:

Here I want to return to the metaphor of the sailing ship, and ask what propels this whole project forward? To be honest, it's the winds of worry and concern: the lowering of water tables and the erosion everywhere of ton after precious ton of topsoil, the logging off of rain- and old-growth forests, the rising of the seas and the measurable and ominous acidification of their waters (another cost of carbon pollution), the extinction of thousands of plant and animal species, the effects on the human body of air and water pollution, not to mention the spiritual emptiness that so many of us feel because of our urban separation from the voices of the earth: all of these compel and propel me in my work, both as a householder and a blogger.

It's my conviction that, for any thinking, feeling, informed citizen of the earth, the present path of industrial civilization is simply out of the question. How can we bear to see the life of the planet suffer this way and not change our behavior? How can we simply continue these habits of waste and consumption? How can we shy from change, especially if by changing, we could invite into our lives and homes so much that is so joyful, sociable, and true?

Until Tuesday the 1st!

HB

A Memory of My Mother

I was ten and my family was living in southern Michigan. Two years before, we had moved from the South of India, where I was born and where Mom and Dad had served as missionaries, teaching at a boarding school in the town of Kodaikanal. For me Kodaikanal had been nearly perfect. It was set in one of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet--the high green hills called the Palnis, full of waterfalls and forest and orchids and birds. More than that though the school community to which my family belonged had been built for and around children; it fed our hunger for enchantment and surrounded us with love. We kids called nearly every adult at the school Uncle or Auntie. Sometimes when Mom and Dad traveled down to the plains together for breaks or for medical appointments, my brothers and sister and I stayed for days with uncles and aunties. I don't remember feeling worried, doing this, or even noticing the difference much. 

On the campus were playgrounds and gardens and at least one place where the playground WAS a garden, and here I mean the garden at the school house where I attended first and second grade. In this garden were meticulously manicured hedges and mossy grottoes ideal for hide and seek, as well as a pond with frogs and polliwogs; also a miniature waterfall featuring at the base of the cascade a metal waterwheel that really turned, attached to a dollhouse-sized mill house made of stone. Sometimes after school I would sit for a long time next to the waterfall and watch the water wheel go. Turning, turning, it would put me into a kind of sweet mechanical dream. 

One day in this garden I found, lying right on the stone pathway where I was walking, a honeycomb with real honey still in the comb--so mysterious, I wondered how it had gotten there, but I didn't wonder if I should eat it. I picked it up off the walk and thumbed it into my mouth and chewed every bit of sticky sweetness out of it like flavor from a stick of gum. I chewed it all the way to the lakeside where I was headed that afternoon--the lake where on the weekends Mom and Dad would take us kids boating in a rowboat rented from the public boathouse. Sometimes we picnicked on the lake. Dad would row us out among the lily pads and lily flowers and Mom would open the picnic basket and we'd all eat the Indian food she made so artfully and lovingly: egg biryani maybe with crispy pumperdums, or her best fluffy rice cakes called idli with coconut chutney and curds. 

But now--wham! Everything was different here in this new place, this town of five hundred souls between Saginaw and Flint in the South of Michigan. Here I certainly didn't call anyone Uncle or Auntie. Here there was no lake or even any hill higher than a pitcher's mound. Here instead of a garden, our playground at school consisted of a few monkey-bars and then some hard, weedy earth. Here the air was so polluted that before we could hang out the wash on the line on Saturdays, we had to run wet wash rags down the lines in order to clean the soot from them; otherwise the shoulders of our shirts and the waistbands of our pants would be smudged black where we hung them from the pins. I was lonely. I was sad. I was disturbed to learn just how unfriendly people could be to each other, even in places where they knew each other pretty well. Why did people who lived in the same place not try to take better care of each other, make each other laugh, enjoy each other? Weren't they bored, the way they were living?

I played hooky from school. I also stole food. I would go down to the basement into our larder and take a jar of applesauce down from the shelf and twist off the lid and take a long slow swig of the stuff. I would revisit the jar of pickles I had opened maybe the day before and fish out another pickle and eat that. Or shake some ketchup from a glass bottle into my palm and lick it from my palm like blood from a wound. I felt guilty about doing all this. I was stealing after all, taking more than my fair share, which in public circumstances (such as when my siblings and I fought over which piece of cake or fried chicken was right for which one of us) wouldn't have been a problem, but which seemed much more nefarious and murky in morality when I was taking that extra for myself in secret. 

Over the weeks and months in which I engaged in pilfering, my feelings of guilt built up and mixed themselves in with my feelings of sadness, and built and built and mixed and mixed until one day--I remember it was a Wednesday because I was sitting in church at midweek school (Christ Lutheran church, Birch Run, Michigan) and all of us kids in my catechism class were singing:

Wind wind blow on me, 
Wind wind set me free,
Wind wind the Father sent, the blessed Holy Spirit

I started to cry. I was remember a windy night in Kodaikanal when I had gone out with my brother Kris to play in the field behind our house. The wind, the mountain wind, was  blowing fresh and clean as Kris and I in our windbreakers ran in circles round the field holding our arms out like birds flying flying...

That night--that Wednesday night in Michigan--I climbed the stairs of our house up to my Mom's bedroom and knocked at the door. 

"Come in."

She was sitting up in bed with the comforter over her, reading a book. I liked it that Mom liked to read. I liked to read too. She set aside the book (pages down) on her nightstand. I closed the door. 
"I've been stealing food," I said.

"I know," she answered. She patted the space beside her on the bed. So I settled in with her in her bed with the comforter over me too, and since it seemed she already knew quite a bit, I decided she might as well know the rest. So I told her pretty much everything that was on my heart that night. How sad I was. How much I missed India. How homesick I was for it. How I wasn't even sure if I believed in God anymore, or at least in God's leadership skills. Why had he led us to Birch Run, the way that she and Dad kept saying he had? And if he had led us to Birch Run, why couldn't he just admit to his mistake so that we could go back? By the time I was done talking, a lot of my tears had soaked into the comforter. 

I can't say what Mom said in reply to all this. I don't remember specific words. What I do remember though is leaving her room that night feeling somehow released. I was lightened of my load of sin, and my sorrow too was eased. I had received forgiveness, comfort, encouragement, and cheer. I had been calmly guided in the truth. With my larder confessions behind me, I really could feel free. 

Of course I still had my deep gnawing hunger for a place I'd always miss. I still had, on wash days, the clotheslines to wipe off, and on Wednesdays that song about the wind somehow to sing through. But the point was this: Someone was on my side, someone who would listen, someone who was smart and liked to read, someone who would probably forgive me even if I stole another pickle, or two. As I descended the stairs, I felt almost five years old again, out on the windy field. This time maybe, with just a little extra jump, I'd fly.

HB

Nutting

Yesterday I went nutting for black walnuts, something I haven't done since I was ten, when my mother, intent on saving on our food budget, had us collect black walnuts from the back yard of the house next door, where a man was dying of emphysema. The invalid's name, if I remember right, was Mr. Bell, Edward Bell, and he liked to sit out on his white porch, his oxygen tank beside him like a fire hydrant. On one occasion as we were gathering the nuts, his eyes met mine and he lifted his hand like a saint in an icon, except no gold leafing was involved here and no halo and just a whole lot of tiredness. Still you got the meaning in the gesture, which was "Hope you like the nuts." 

To get to the nutting place yesterday I rode my bike, which is an aluminum three-speed equipped with spacious baskets on the back (I get a remarkable number of compliments on my bike baskets; sometimes these are so sincere that I worry for the sanity of the speakers. You can almost hear them saying "nifty" or "swell.") For this particular transport job, I lined my baskets with large plastic bags. You see, the nuts in their freshly fallen state (still in their husks) are pungently odiferous, or if you prefer, smelly. Also, anything they come into contact with, they'll stain an inky green or black color, so if you're the cleanly sort, be cautious. On my own hands as I handle the nuts I wear gloves of thick neoprene, which just for good measure extend most of the way up the forearm.

The trees, all owned by the same household, are wonderful tall mature black walnut trees that produce fine chunky nuts. The family that owns the trees has never used the nuts for eating. I certainly don't blame them for this. Even folks who are crazy for the flavor of black walnuts--a flavor dark and complex as swirled smoke--might not care to do all the work necessary to gather, husk, cure, crack, and extract. Heck just the job of raking them up for removal is work enough. The family is happy to let me take the nuts though. They really love the trees too; in fact they treasure everything about their house and yard. It's one of the handsomest houses in the city: brick and clean and charismatic and imposing. If their house were one of our forty-four presidents, I suppose it would be Thomas Jefferson. Its many windows are as clear as that man's perspicuous mind.

There are some ten trees in all: four in front along the road, and half a dozen standing at the southern edge of the lot. The trees in the front yard drop their nuts onto the sidewalk and the road, and they must get a sweet perennial kick out of doing this. Drop. Drop. I've heard them drop nuts on cars both passing and parked. Thonk. Thonk. One time while I was walking past the area a driver stopped his vehicle with a jerk, got out, and inspected the roof. Sure enough there was a messy stain on top of his car, although no dent. He looked at me as if he suspected I had had some part in the affair. "Black walnut trees," I said pointing up. "That's so crazy," he answered. So much for oneness with nature.

Yesterday I stuck to the back-yard trees. I bent down and picked up nut after nut, dropping the keepers into one of my bags. Occasionally as I worked, just for the olfactory pleasure of it I might bring one of the nuts closer up to my nose for a good sniff. It's a vaguely piney or juniperish smell but with a definite difference. Once you've smelled it, you'll never confuse it with anything else. It's like cinnamon that way. Or vanilla extract. Or your college roommate's foot odor (after he came back from working a factory shift at Malt-O-Meal). The source of the scent lies in the husks of the nut, in a compound called juglone, and it's bitter--juglone is--so it's important to get the nut as soon as possible out of the husk; you must not, repeat must not wait till the husks dry out, because by then the nut will have been rendered bitter and inedible. Think of this as a culinary fire alarm situation. Keeper-nuts by the way are especially the ones with yellow husks, the green ones being still unripe, and the black ones too decomposed and perhaps already too bitter in the nut itself to be taking a chance on.

Husking is not a job for the squeamish; invariably it involves worms and maggots, which lay their eggs in the mushy undersides of the husks--party revelers you just have to ignore. I sit at home in the driveway, the nut bags beside me and a tarp in front of me to keep the husks from staining the concrete. There is a small tool I use for any husk that proves stubborn, but for the most part all I need is my gloved hands. Now regarding the wrigglies again, maybe one in three nuts will contain something of that sort. As far as the nuts themselves are concerned, it's unlikely that the worms at this stage have done any damage to the inside chambers or the nut, and if you just rob them of their warm husky homes, they pretty much evaporate on their own. As for the yuck factor, I myself am immune to it, in the first place because I own a colony of red wigglers in my basement who help me with my composting and who might as well be my drinking buddies I get along with them so well, and in the second place because I grew up in India, where I must have eaten a good deal of dirt, because I was always getting roundworms. You took a chalky orange-tasting medicine to get rid of them, as I recall. By the way Richard the III had roundworms too. Or so they say. Trivia for the day.

As I labor, the husks smell more and more wonderful, and curiously enough some of them actually feel warm. And yes I mean the nuts themselves are warm. Like miniature reactors. And this warmth is actually from decay. Each underside of the husk is like a compost heap that's chemically and biologically fired. But do any of them smell of rot? No, not at all. Again it's all quite aromatic and sensual, and in fact the mucky softness of the undersides, yes that mucky softness reminds me of something my mother used to tell me about. She told me that when she was a girl, often after it rained she would run from her house to a nearby park, and there she'd take off her shoes and socks and walk around barefoot in the mud, which at least in that special corner of the park always proved incredibly soft and delicate and liked to squeeze its way deliciously up between her toes. These girlhood mud-walks must have been important to her, because she told me about them on several occasions, including one on which she was very close to death. It had to have been a magnificent discovery, that mud, and a wonderful deed to walk through it, palpating the cosmos.

Nut after nut comes free from its husk, and I drop each one (dark as a newborn slick with blood) into a sky-blue bucket: thunk, thunk. That's Edward Bell, that's my mother, and someday soon enough, that's me...

HB

A Garden Report--Sustainability at Sunnyside

It has been a good year for the garden. Plenty has been learned in terms of how-to, plenty grown, plenty eaten. In fact, as far as the final category goes, I wouldn't be surprised if say by November the bounty amounts to well over a third of what my wife and I will have eaten this summer and fall. And the value of the produce continues into the winter months as well. As many potatoes and onions as seems practicable will be put into dry storage (we store them suspended on chicken wire spread between the beams in the basement, so when we walk around here in the house, the potatoes and onions are literally right there underfoot.) The zucchini will live on in zucchini bread frozen in the freezer; the leeks likewise in leek-potato soup frozen in jars. And most of our tomatoes have already been converted into sauce, which this year we pressure-canned. In a few weeks too, we'll harvest (from the dried up vines) all the hard-won and long-awaited trophies of our winter squashes. Many of these will keep all the way until the garden is producing again next year: a kind of bridge over seasons, a bridge of nourishment. 

The garden that feeds us at Sunnyside is not even located on the premises. It's down the way at my brother-in-law's. The necessary land is shared as a gift in the family. And the labor too has been shared. Especially during our camping trip this summer we Sunnysiders had to count on others in the family watering nearly daily what at the time were just delicate aspiring seedlings. Without the help of family there's no way the garden would have turned out as bountiful as it did. I suppose if there is any advice I would give to anyone who wants to take up gardening with any level of seriousness, it would be this: try to find people who can help you out on occasion. Family is probably best. But maybe a neighbor or a friend who likes fresh produce can be of help as well. Or maybe a neighbor kid who could use a little extra cash. Otherwise, especially when you're away, all your hard work as well as your future harvest lies purely at the mercy of the elements.

Some of our best choices this year in regard to the garden had to do with our concern to make it beautiful. We planted (right there in among the vegetable beds) all sorts of flowers: nasturtiums, marigolds, buckwheat, borage, morning glories of all colors, and the tall cosmos with its saffron-colored blooms. All these spiffed up the appearance of the garden even as they attracted the bumble bees, honey bees, and butterflies necessary to pollinate our crops. They also rendered the garden a more cheerful place in which to work, I mean for humans! And I have an idea that they helped to make my brother-in-law happy too, just to know that his faith in the family's ability to follow through on a project as big as this, taking place right there in his yard, wasn't misplaced. No, we all came through, and here we have it, just what we aimed for: a green space designed in love, reflecting a striving toward mutual nourishment.

Not to say everything's perfect, especially appearance-wise! In fact, it's important to say that if you want to start a garden, and especially a vegetable garden, it's best, from the start, to accept certain truths: one of which is that a vegetable garden doesn't always look that great. Oh at certain times of the year, particularly in the late spring early summer, when all the plants are so green and new and vibrant-looking they seem ready to jump out of the earth and run around root-naked in the sun when no one's looking--THEN a vegetable garden looks beautiful. What about toward late summer though? I mean when the potato vines outgrow their beds and take to crawling over the paths, and the Japanese beetles have chawed the raspberry leaves to a kind of tattered lace, and a windstorm or two has passed through, toppling the bamboo bean trellises, and the tomato plants have become gangly and long and almost squid-like in their cages, and mildew has crept over the squash leaves like a sickly white frost, and the corn stalks have been trampled and ransacked by the coons, those Visigoths of the urban treetops and alley ways.

Even rip-roaring production success sometimes converts to cosmetic disaster. At the West end of our garden is a squash vine on a trellis, a vine that proved so productive this year, so ponderous with squashes, that one day its trellis just keeled right over, taking the vine with it. The whole business fell on the compost bin, and since the trellis could not be raised off of the bin without risking damage to the vine, composting operations had to be suspended in that location. It's all a snaky mess. A glorious snaky mess, but nevertheless a mess. We live and learn. Better luck next season, when a stronger trellis will be the order of the day. Or maybe we'll just not plant a squash vine there. 

So. If youthful looks in plants and perpetual neatness in presentation are your concern, don't plant a vegetable garden. Vegetable gardens, just like people, age and wrinkle and wither and die. Which process has its beauty too of course, and brings up another blessing that inheres to the art of gardening; that it helps you come to terms with difficult truths such as mortality, yes it gives you plenty of annual practice with mortality.  Every year you watch your plants move from one stage of existence to the next: from birth to seedling infancy to sapling adolescence to middle age and fruitfulness to old age and death and decay by means of which they return to the soil from which they came. And they soil is key to this wisdom, because every year you learn again that the soil is really a means of transforming death and decay into the potential for life. The soil is like a battery of life, charged with the stuff of death. The more death in it, in the form of converted organic matter, the richer its potential for life. Or it is like the nebulae in deep space--clouds of gas and dust where stars are born. Light springs from the chaos of the cloud, but the cloud has to be there first.

Two questions for this turn of the seasons called September: How might we live in such a way as to add to the metaphoric star clouds and soil of our collective future, the greatest possible potential for life? At what point in our individual lives do we say, "I have taken enough to grow; now truly I must begin to bear fruit and die?"


HB

Dill Overkill

When I was twelve or so and living in Wisconsin, on occasion I would make a visit to the pantry storeroom which occupied the southwest corner of our basement. You opened the storeroom door and, for some light on the subject, pulled a drawstring. There they all were: Jars of peaches. Jars of plums. Jars of stewed tomatoes. Jars of tomato sauce. Jars of  beets. Jars of jam. And the pickles! The pickles alone took two full shelves, a culinary country all on their own. It was a pleasure to take a census. Pickled carrots. Pickled beets. Pickled cauliflower. Pickled watermelon rind. Pickled baby corn. Bread and butter pickles. And dills, dills, dills.

The dills were home-made, as was everything else in the pantry of course. My mother made them. She put them up at intervals during the summer, continuing to do so as long as cucumber season held out. She brought cucumbers home from the farmers' market in lumpy bags, cut them in long quarter-wedges, brined them, and then pickled and canned them in Mason quart-jars transparently amenable to a tasty view. She always shelved the dills on the highest shelf of the pantry, and that seemed appropriate to me. To me they were the crown jewel of all her canning kingdom.

Now as we all know, adolescents have a tendency to take preferences to an extreme. You like a rock band, suddenly that's the only band for you. You like the fourth amendment, suddenly that's the whole constitution. Well so on the cusp of my own adolescence, following this law of behavior when it came to my mother's pickles I eschewed all variety on her magnificently outfitted shelves--all in favor of the dills. I was a dill obsessionist. A dill-daffy Romeo, and Juliet was my dill. Rosalind Gherkin? Who was she? 

All until....well, until that fateful day. Call it the Wausau dill disaster. Or, dill overkill. Or just, my fill of dill. 

I was alone in the house. Don't know how this happened; there were six in my family, so it seemed as though I was never alone, but that day really I was, and to take advantage of this fact I was going to eat some pickles, specifically dills. And so there I was, down in the pantry, looking up and lustily eyeing a jar thereof. There! There on the top shelf, that one. I tipped it greedily down. I took it  (cradled in my right arm like a football) up up the stairs into the kitchen, where I sat down at the table with the jar in front of me. And now I unscrewed the ring. Unscrew unscrew. And now my fingernails pried off the lid. Pry. There was a sucking sound, then a pop. Mmm. Smell that vinegar. Smell the dill. 

This whole scheme was totally illegal by the way, what I was doing--totally illegal, domestically speaking. After all, I was not the only one in the house who relished pickles, and so for me to appropriate a full quart-jar of dills for my own personal consumption was a clear breach not only of decorum but of Bjornstad family food morality. In allegorical miniature I was Britain and France and Belgium taking whatever wasn't bolted down from Africa. Or I was Custer waving around his pistol for purposes of ripping off the Cheyenne and the Sioux. But nothing was going to stop me, not that afternoon and not with such a sweet chance for solitary gluttony as this. No, I would consume and consume and consume until every last pickle was gone and the jar was empty but for the vinegar water and a soggy pathetic little umbrella of a dill sprig or two. I was determined. The thing was determined.

So that's what happened. That's what I did. Within fifteen minutes I had eaten those pickles god bless them every one.  A full quart jar of dills. Believe me it's possible. Oddly enough though, now that I had eaten them all, I was feeling a bit queasy. A bit green around the gills. What should I do about this? Moving slowly and methodically, so as to keep the digestive sloshing to a minimum, I cleaned out the jar at the sink, then stashed it away downstairs in the basement below the stairs. Other empty jars gathered dust there, awaiting the resurrection of the canning season to follow. I went outside and mounted my trusty Schwinn ten speed which was really technically a semi-trusty Schwinn five speed because one of the shifters didn't work, and I rode down to the Tasty Freeze on Third Avenue to buy a soft-serve ice cream cone. I figured that would settle my stomach down a bit. Hey if you've just gone a little heavy on the dill pickles, why not just top it off with a little blanket of a vanilla soft-serve? Makes sense, doesn't it?

So that's what I did. I ordered (at the Tasty Freeze shop window) a soft-serve cone in the flavor or maybe non-flavor of vanilla, then went out back by the dumpster, to lick at it like sick dog trying to eat the grass. It was late April by the way. There was still snow on the ground, at least where the snow plows had shoved it up in piles to clear the parking lot. The Tasty Freeze had just opened up that week or so. Good thing it had. Otherwise what would I have done, I mean how would I deal with these sloshy fulminations of my stomach? I proceeded to lick. 

I didn't get very far though. With the licking I mean. And certainly not with any semblance of swallowing. Instead out there by the dumpster something made me bend over and something made some stuff came up out of my mouth. A great deal of it in fact. A great deal that was green and seedy and non functional as food anymore came up. Blechhhh. Blechhh. Blechhh. Oh yuck. All over one of these beautiful parking spaces for cars. I kicked a couple of boulders of dirty wet snow on top of the general mess of vomit and stomped it all flat and then smoothed it over with my shoe as though my shoe was a butterknife and the snow was the butter. There. All gone. Though there was still the faint smell of dill rising through the snow. Now for my ice cream cone. It was still in my hand. I still had part of the cone. Oddly enough though it didn't look that appetizing anymore. In fact it never really had. So I threw it in the dumpster. 

And so that was that: my idiotic misadventure in the land of dill gluttony. And it changed me. I do still eat dills, but sadly no longer feel the passion for them that I had in the days of yester-yore; and to tell the truth I miss that uncontrollable passion for a pickle. Odd how, in order to maintain the pleasure of an obsession, it may sometimes be necessary to control yourself in the excercise of it! Over the next few months when, at the dinner table, dill wedges appeared in front of me pickle tray, I admit that they even made me feel a wee bit ill. But I also had to command myself to eat the pickles anyway, since my love for them was an accepted fact in the household, and certainly I didn't want to raise suspicions. All of this was poetic justice, a bitter self correction for my gluttony and my thieving.

In almost every way my kidnapping and solitary consumption of that quart of dills was so amazingly dumb that I hesitate to dignify it by attempting to extract wise conclusions from the experience. Still, here are a few thoughts: 

1. With regard to dills and many other frills and minor thrills in life: Some features of existence are so to speak side dishes and appetizers. Don't treat them as the main course.
2. With regard to soft-serve at the Tasty Freeze: Don't make one mistake worse by piling another mistake on top of it. Although if you do, perhaps you can take comfort in the following proverb by William Blake: "You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough."
3. With regard to stealing what's not yours when others are away:  if you forfeit a pleasure while pursuing it at others' expense, serves you right.
4. With regard to the vomit: Be aware that non-functional waste streams have a way of coming up unbidden and unexpectedly. Consider the little leaks at Fukishima. Or consider Deepwater Horizon. Or consider all the fracking going on in North Dakota and Pennsylvania.
5. With regard to sampling the beauty of diversity (so well illustrated by my mother's shelves of pickles): cultivating a healthy enjoyment of variety may just be the perfect means of cultivating a deeper enjoyment of our favorites. 
6. With regard to stashing away the jar: You may hide the evidence from others, but often your memory holds onto it by the sticky handle of guilt. 
7. With regard to the comedy in what might seem a comic tale: Just how comic is human over-consumption? Especially when multiplied say by 7.5 billion or thereabouts? 

HB