History

In art, politics, school, church, business, love or marriage–
in a piece of work or in a career–
strongly spent is synonymous with kept.

ROBERT FROST

She taught me the names of flowers: calendula, ranunculus, Iceland poppy.
And the medicinal uses of herbs: Fenugreek opens up a stuffy head;
goldenseal lubricates the cracked mucous membranes. Over a circa 1820
American dropleaf table, she told me asparagus was the broom of
the kidneys. I hadn’t understood at first and thought she’d used
a German word I pictured as brüm and not as the little stalks standing
on their heads, sweeping out the impurities. I learned to make
the perfect roux for soufflé and became her efficient assistant
in the kitchen–dicing and chopping, she once told me, with unparalleled
patience. Then one day she began to accidentally break my Depression
glassware, and I recalled how she’d giggled when she told me that
in two years of marriage she had singlehandedly decimated her husband’s
glass collection dating from 1790 to 1810, including a rare wedding goblet.
In the doorway to the back porch she stated simply
that my presence made her feel strangled, it was
nothing I was doing or could do. We saw a therapist
for six years, while my collection dwindled then became
memory. With unparalleled patience I jumped through hoop
after burning hoop, the therapist pointed out, but I heard that
as praise for my prowess and continued to balance Bauer plates
on my nose on command; hold growling tigers off with Windsor
dining-room chairs; juggle career, job, hope, and nightly tempests
with unparalleled dexterity. I could reassemble anything: shattered
Permaflector lampshades from the thirties; shredded pictures
of us crossing the street with canes in the future, my hand
under her elbow. My heart. But what I lacked, I can see now, was the ability
to dissemble. Finally, she brought home a Cuisinart food processor, and I
started hearing the minutes slicing away with ferocious velocity, time doing
its soft-shoe faster and faster like Fred Astaire on amphetamines. Memories
of flowers and herbs were sacrificed to the angry god of its vortex. Your
voice is like acid on my skin, she said after twelve years, then grabbed her
Cuisinart and left me behind like so much history.