SPRING CLEANING AND OTHER TRANSFORMATIONS

The back doors are open onto the garden, letting in the cool morning air. It's promising to be a scorcher today, a late June kind of day in late May, so I''ll close the windows and curtains later to try to keep the most intense heat out. Just a few weeks ago we were talking about extra-chilly nights and now we've leapt into full-summer mode. Mother Nature keeps us light on our feet and forces us to be adaptable; we complain as we adapt, but are lucky to have the ability to change and to transform ourselves...

Transformation is where I've been this week, engaged in the task of transforming this house from a much lived-in student dwelling to a clean and airy space. The impetus, apart from a growing urge to clean things up and spring-clean clutter out the door, as the spring sunshine highlighted the dirt on the windows and the dustballs under the furniture, was a rather wonderful offer from a faraway friend named David Trasoff, a sarode player who lives in Los Angeles.

We'd met in Kerala, at Kovalam, in 1999, just before the turn of the year and the millenium, and then kept in sporadic touch. He wrote in the winter this year to say that he'd be in Toronto to perform at a Bengali wedding and would I be interested in hosting a house concert? Sure, I wrote back, How do we do this? He designed an invitation and then as the time got closer I wrote to friends and acquaintances, attaching the invite. it fell in the middle of the Canadian 24 May weekend, so I expected many people would be out of town. But with an unknown number of friends and strangers coming, I knew it was time to take on the layers of dirt in the house.

A good friend did a big chunk of the labour, vacuuming rugs and floors and wiping down surfaces. It's hard work, strenuous exercise that makes my morning jog look very easy. And once you start this kind of process, I find, it extends itself to other areas, of the house and of life. The urge to tidy and sort, to come to grips with long-avoided messes, becomes irresistable, a kind of cathartic purging. Maybe this is what those addicts of colonic irrigation feel about their bodies? I wonder.

As I washed the windows and carried out bags of discarded clothing and other unwanteds, I had time to think about all the effort humans around the world put into keeping chaos at bay and protecting ourselves against encroaching dirt, disease, disorder of all kinds. It's the primary struggle for survival. In tropical villages it's important to sweep up dead leaves and burn them, so that snakes have nowhere to hide themselves; everywhere in the world we clean up our food carefully to keep rats and mice away; and in cities especially we wash our hands when we return home from being out in public places to protect ourselves from disease. (Of course these days many people in North American cities carry hand-cleanser with them wherever they go, which feels like fearful over-reaction somehow; you may disagree!)

There's a mental health aspect to this too. Perhaps it's evolutionary. We know that safety and wellness depend on our taking charge of our environment. Because keeping destructive nature at bay can be a matter of life and death, disorder and dirt make us edgy and unhappy. And the converse is true too: having things clean and in order can make us happy, and can be very relaxing. So my thoughts went on, as sparkle returned to my windows and clarity to my house.

Then it was time to empty the living room completely of chairs and tables etc. And onto the clear open space of the floor we laid overlapping layers of rugs, covering the floor completely. It reminded me of my grandfather's apartment long ago, which, because he loved rugs and buying them and giving them away, was often three layers deep in rugs, a rotating population of richly coloured and patterned Persian and Caucasian rugs. It also looked like a prayer room, a place of airy ease, with cushions by the walls, and rugs nothing but rugs everywhere to sit or lie on: an invitation.

At last came time for the house concert, late on the sunny Sunday holiday weekend afternoon... People found their way in through the garden, took off their shoes, and the house filled with life and talk. Then it was time to start, so they found a place, each of them and made themselves comfortable on the rugs or perched on stools. The music - David, a master of the sarode, whose great long-time teacher Usted Ali Akhbar Khan died just last June, playing sarode, and Ravi Naimpally, arguably the leading tabla player in this part of Canada, on tabla - was astonishing. It was like an intense infinitely unwinding meditation, as they took us into a lovely long afternoon raga...and more ... Afterward, conversation with friends and visitors was easy and happy in the soft warm air of early evening, all of us transported to a new place and space by the music.

And now? Well now I have a house that is not just clean and airy, but also transformed by the music, given fresh life and breath and energy. Thank-you, all who helped and all who came, and especially, thank-you David.


POSTSCRIPTS:
ONE: Here is a link to David Trasoff and to his music.

TWO: Another week of agony and violence has unravelled in Thailand, with anger still at the boil, though the streets of Bangkok are calmer and clean-up has started. It's a huge toll this has taken on everyone, but especially on the poor. There's a comment in the Herald Tribune, republished today in the NYTimes, about it all, the larger picture, that points out that China which benefits from Thailand's loss of stability... (it's here), Thailand that has for a long time been an anchor of non-totalitarian and often democratic government in southeast Asia. Let's hope that the social and political fabric can get knitted together enough that people can move forward with hope and some confidence. It's not hclear ow things will unfold in the next months, but it will be bumpy, for sure. Fingers crossed.

EGGS ARE A VERY PERSONAL MATTER

Eggs are a very personal matter said my friend Dina the other day. We were talking about my love of a fried egg on greens or on leftover reheated dal, or on anything that catches my eye really. From there we went on to talk about omelets and scrambled eggs.

I don't scramble eggs often, in fact really never. But a couple of weeks ago I was staying with friends in the country, and bacon and scrambled eggs was on the breakfast agenda. "Sure, I'll do the eggs if you'd like," I found myself saying. And then I realised that as a non-scrambler of eggs, I was operating under false pretences. Ah well, these are close friends, so why not try it anyway, expertise or not? (And my friends have, over the years, become very tolerant of my approximateness!)

I broke six eggs (good farm eggs) into a glass bowl, whisked them, then added a generous quarter cup of cream and whisked some more. In went salt, pepper, a dash of soy sauce... not much really. I heated a mix of olive oil and butter and tossed in a little chopped green onion, then poured in the whisked eggs. I did the slow pulling of the cooked edges inward method, then at the almost last-minute, sprinkled on some small pieces of smoked salmon (leftovers from the night before, lightly tossed with a little lemon juice first).

The egg was lush and tender, still moist in many places, but not runny. And it was delicious!

Hurrah for the cook who takes a chance! It seems to me that if you love eggs, as I do, and have confidence in them, then you can't go far wrong. So take your preference for eggs and go forth with valour and determination! If others criticise your way with eggs, let them make their own. You know what you are good at, and you just go right ahead in your own way!

It's now January 13, the birthday of two good friends, precious, both of them... and tomorrow I catch a plane to fly to Thailand. It's a direct Toronto-HongKong flight on Air Canada, a thrilling route over the pole. This time last year I wrote about the flight and also about the January 14 date, because it is my father's long-ago death day. And this year I'll actually be flying through the air in a kind of timeless limbo on the 14th. I'm glad. I don't feel the weight of the "surly bonds of earth" as the poet refers to them. But I do love the between-places feeling once I am fully en route.

There's also something about the turning of the year that is freeing, don't you think? As we enter the year of the Tiger, my birth year, and wonderfully associated with strength and good fortune and energy, I find I'm feeling revitalised and ready for whatever comes next. I hope you are too.

POSTSCRIPT: But of course there's no way that anyone can be ready or should have to be ready for the kind of extreme tragedy that the people of Haiti are living through right now. It seems from reports that the most effective way that outsiders can be of help is to donate money, rather than material help such as clothing; the time for that will come later.

NEW YORK - ER

Just back, on Saturday night in gusts of wind and rain, from a trip to New York.  The excuse was a conference jointly sponsored by NYU and the James Beard Foundation that focussed on food and China.  The title? Dumplings and Dynasties. 

I gave a talk with slides about the regions Beyond the Great Wall, with intro and questions from Jim Oseland, the well-travelled and engaged-with-the-world editor of Saveur, who is a good friend.  But the stars of the show for me were two academics: Joana Whaley-Cohen who gave the opening talk, setting Chinese food in an historical and cultural context that was fresh and wonderfully clear; and the always-wonderful Sidney Mintz, anthropologist and clear-thinker about food and culture and the politics of both, who gave the closing address.  (In Japan artists who are very very special may be named national treasures; I think Sid Mintz should get that designation.) 

There was time, too to see Ann Bramson, our wonderful editor (at Artisan).  Got her out of the office to MOMA, a treat for us both (the Miro exhibit, and also the Van Gogh by night).

Now, this week, comes the annual Food issue of the New Yorker, with Jane Kramer's profile of us.  We're of course very curious to read it and to see what photos there are etc...  (Our copy hasn't come yet, and I can't wait, but we've heard nice things from people all over.)  The best part about all this was that we got to spend a lot of time with Jane last May, a real pleasure for everyone in the family and for our friends, too.

I'm headed to Thailand tomorrow, and will try to post from there.  We've got some getting ready to do, for the cooking immersion courses we're doing in February in Chiang Mai (see the Chiang Mai page in immersethrough.com for details).  I'm looking forward to warm air on my skin, fresh papaya, and hot sour salty sweet everything!

chowk dee!

BEING TRANSPORTED...

We're heading out tomorrow morning early, on a flight to San Francisco.  We're giving a talk and slide show at an event at Draeger's, in San Mateo, tomorrow night.  The next day Jeffrey continues west, to Thailand, and I turn around and come back to Toronto.  

How strange, that we can fly around like this, transporting ourselves around the globe.  It is a little unsettling, and it should be (and not just for carbon footprint reasons).  The moment we start taking travel for granted, we're in big trouble.  It still has a magical feel to me, even trips like this, to a place in North America that I have been to a number of times...  

Maybe it's the possibility of encounters with strangers, unexpected conversations, glimpses into other lives.   That for sure is a big part of it.  And perhaps too it's just the remarkable transplanting that happens when we arrive by plane somewhere completely other, and then are able to walk and drive around as if we'd always been there.  Surely it should show, I sometimes think, the fact that I've just stepped off a plane and am finding everything new and different here.  But it rarely does, or at least not so that anyone would notice!

And of course it's always good to remember what a small proportion of the people in the world ever get to fly in a plane.  This Tibetan nomad girl, whom we met in the Changtang, the huge plateau of western Tibet, probably never will, for example.

On another subject, our friend Kaz dropped by today, a lovely surprise.  She's begun to write poetry again. As she says, it comes from an entirely different place than prose.  I find myself envying that deeply sure artist's confidence of hers, and also grateful that she is enriching the world for all of us.