#59 - The Stochastic Bombastic
Salad Days; The Self-Actualized Toddler; Flash Fiction: Artem in the Night; Time Machine
Hello, my friends,
Springtime is here in earnest at least when it comes to the bugs; it feels like insects have returned in full force over the past two weeks: Ladybugs, flies, gnats, even a few spiders. It’s nice to know that the earth is teeming with life, but whoever planned this really loaded a lot in a short time. Maybe space out the little guys more next time? In less jolly news, there’s nothing quite like waking to a howling child every two hours every night. Expect, of course, having a infant. The difference between that and Michael’s tonsillectomy recovery is that our kind-hearted young warrior wakes from his very deep sleeps shrieking in a pain that makes it hard for him to focus on swallowing the medication to remove it.
I expect that this is a normal part of healing from his operation and will improve in a few more days, to be remain nothing but a tiny blip a year from now. Still, it’s hard. I was so out-of-sorts a couple of mornings ago that I decided to have a normal, caffeinated, espresso. For those not in the know, I’ve been drinking decaf for a few years now, so this was an unusual step. Nevertheless, life goes on. I’ve been off from work most of this week to help care for Michael. Our days have been peaceful — trips to the zoo, a nice nearby garden, and today, the plan is the Natural History Museum unless it rains too hard. Thunderstorms are expected.
I keep joking with Ashley that we should do a Lord of the Rings marathon and a stormy day would be perfect. But, despite Michael’s unflappability at scary stuff, I think it may be a little too early for a journey to Mordor. If only because it’s a whole lot of movie for a single day. But then, isn’t life a whole lot of movie in a single day?
Salad Days
Earlier this week, I asked a local Facebook group to recommend the best salad at local restaurants. Surprisingly, there were some common answers that I plan to explore, yet I remain skeptical. Since these people don’t know my criteria for a top-notch salad, how could they possibly share answers that would be helpful? Longtime HMF readers are shaking their heads right now: “Of course he has opinions about salads and not only that…he’s about to share them!” That’s right, folks, grab your salad bowls and plop them on your heads like hard hats, you’re about to find out the top quality of an amazing salad:
(But first, if you’ve been reading Hello, My Friends for any length of time and find it either amusing or infuriating, do share it with your friends and frenemies, respectively. I’m happy with my 71 subscribers, but 100 would also be nice.)
So yes, the most important thing that makes a salad world class is…
(Truly, if you can share your favorite HMF post to a social media network like PoofCake or BumbleToad, it would go far to encourage me to provide you with the hardest-hitting hot-takes on topics like banana bread, parenting little kids, and 300-year old haiku.)
If I was to choose the one characteristic of a premiere vegetable medley, it would be (oh, you’re too shy to promote HMF to your social circle? I see how it is. I see…Well…You’re the one with a salad bowl on your head. Everyone here knows it, too. We’re all doing it simultaneously wherever this is being read! Home, coffee shoppe, shower, podiatrist’s office, there are HMF readers with salad bowls on their heads. So yeah, returning to business…)
Balance. Balance is the key to a gorgeous salad.
Whether there are two ingredients or ten, an unbalanced salad is just crazy! And there is a lot of insane salad-ness going around. Consider how salads at so many restaurants come out drenched in dressing! It’s like bleu cheese soup with bits of lettuce and croutons. Or how the protein completely overshadows lackluster vegetables and goopy dressing. It’s wrong! Or how most vegetables in restaurant salads seem like they were conceived in a factory and put in a plastic death-bag before being delivered to your neighborhood bistro and exhumed onto your plate and made-up with a some frisky dressing. They taste about as fresh as those slimy melon slices you get when you order fresh fruit as a side at Denny’s.
No, it’s a travesty. A beautiful salad is a choir of flavors all singing together with a leader orchestrating the various combinations — sometimes, a solo, sometimes several singers are louder, sometimes all are in harmony. In the end, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. A salad recipe requires testing, reflection, and humility. The chef must understand, especially in a recipe written for home cooks that, unlike with baked goods where mediocre ingredients will still make a passable pie, mediocre salad ingredients make for a dour experience that will sour little kids on salads FOR LIFE. The recipe writer must take that into account and craft the recipe to allow for lackluster lettuce or tart (rather than sweet) tomatoes. It’s a delicate situation. And for restaurant salads, even more so because the expectation is that it was crafted by a professional!
Do the places recommended by the Montrose FB group understand what I’ve written above? Well, DO THEY!?! None of us can know. All I can say is that Lewis Carroll has already extolled the virtue of beautiful soup, and I’ve tasted its marvels. Now it’s time for salad to have its turn. I’m ready, life, fill my bowl!
(You can remove the salad bowl from your head now)
The Self-Actualized Toddler
I was in a parenting class last year (mentioned briefly in #10) where the teacher proved conclusively that our adult behaviors related to expressing anger are exactly the same as those of a toddler. I’d take this even further to say that the majority of human adult behavior, especially related to emotions, is practically indistinguishable from children aged 2-5. All the big words, domain knowledge, and psychoanalytic description makes it seem more complicated, but at our root, we’re all still acting like kids.
Really, this is a huge compliment to the youths! Five-year-olds are pretty advanced; they can learn new things, adjust behavior based on past experience, modulate their emotions, interact with humans and other animals, reluctantly do chores and other reasonably complex tasks, and more. Break down your everyday life to the fundamentals and you’re just a five-year-old who knows a few things. This works for our positive capabilities and our aberrations as well.
We’re all running our lives with five-year-old behaviors and thought patterns and some of us are even going to therapy to overcome neural highways which were (or are being) caused by other people acting like five-year-olds. Think about challenges you have with yourself and your life: What are you struggling with? Do preschoolers struggle with variations of those things, too? If you were an enlightened parent of that youngster, how would you help them out of that situation? This question (and this whole section) is either insulting to my readers or a useful perspective to take. I’m not sure which.
So then what’s the point of all of this awkward cogitating? I think it’s to say that being an effective, “well-regulated” adult is really hard. Maybe even impossible! We’re irrational, wired weird, and by gosh, we make almost no sense at all! Humans perpetrate genocides, deliberately dump harmful chemicals into lakes, yell at our spouses while at the same time risking our own lives to save others, willingly turning over items of value (like money) to help complete strangers through charitable organizations, hold doors, and a few of us even keep up with the laundry, eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly, and write thoughtful greeting cards to friends and family. Yet, I feel like most of us struggle to do even one of those things.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t had a full night of sleep for the past week but I look around and I’m honestly flabbergasted that humans (a bunch of hairy, overgrown five-year-olds) continue to, somehow, make life work on Earth. Not to mention in places like Australia where half the non-human animals are just waiting to kill you. So if you’re out there reading this and also happen to be a human: Kudos on getting here. Now go do your laundry!
Flash Fiction: Artem in the Night
In the middle of the night Artem, age six, looked at his father peacefully sleeping. "Papa," he whispered so quietly that it could have just been mistaken for the air moving.
Yet, Arkady's eyes opened immediately to see the boy several feet away. The whole boy. All there, in the moonlit dark: Hair, pajamas, feet, that sweet face. For a long moment, he studied his son mindlessly, just looking. Every time he saw Artem, it was like he was a whole new boy -- his only son, growing up. Arkady carefully pushed off the blanket so as not to wake his wife and sat up, swinging his legs off the bed.
Artem waited for his father to ask what was wrong.
Instead, Arkady's peaceful gaze move casually from his son's face down to his shoulder, to his arm and, finally, to the hand where, yes, he held the button. The button that made him disappear.
"No," his father murmured, looking away. "No," he repeated quietly, face anguished.
"No. No!" Arkady let out again as he stood up unsteadily. The boy took a small step back. Arkady followed. The boy backed up more.
Arkady squatted to Artem's eye level. Plaintively, he motioned to the button and reached out his hand.
The boy looked worried. His eyes went from his father to the button.
"No, no no!" Arkady begged, forgetting that it was night time, forgetting everything but that button and what it did to his son. He moved closer, hand still out. The boy was frightened. Arkady rushed forward, unseeing, into nothing.
Falling to his knees, he beat his fists on the floor repeating no until both the word and his pounding lost their meaning. Tonight, agony ended quickly. Twenty seconds, maybe, and the night was silent again.
In bed, Larisa was facing the other way, eyes open. She knew that Artem came only to his father in the middle of the night and that there was nothing she could do to help. Closing her eyes, she listened to the rhythm of her husband's heavy breathing, allowing him his private desiderium.
Time Machine
Here’s what I wrote in HMF a year ago (in issue #6):
Small Gratitudes: Recollection of a simple toy and how it opened my imagination.
RIP, Ryuichi Sakamoto: A small note on the death of the beloved composer.
Don’t Share, Self-Care: An acknowledgement that sometimes it’s okay not to share (a cookie).
mysteriously, this got stuck in my spam box, so I'm late reading this - hopefully your dear little one is all well by now? so sorry he's experiencing so much pain. when I had mine out, many moons ago, I only had a sore throat for a day or maybe less, notable merely for it mildly curbing my usual gluttony