margaret erhart
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tiramisu and the faces of janus

12/31/2020

4 Comments

 
Picture
If you’re the one who lost your grocery list and coupons last Sunday outside my house, don’t worry, I have them and will keep them until the organic power greens coupon with a 75-cent savings expires on January 31st. But the two-or-more avocado coupon with a savings of 40 cents expires on January 3rd, just a few days from now, so there’s some urgency about the avocados. Both coupons are attached to your grocery list with a paperclip, and I see from the list that you have company, possibly all of them vegetarians, but vegetarians with a sweet tooth. Brussels sprouts, leeks, beets, red and white wine, olive oil, butterfly noodles, finished off with whatever delightful dessert calls for mascarpone, most likely tiramisu. And I’ve learned that a vegan tiramisu can be made with avocados, so I’m feeling more certain about where that mascarpone is headed. Your handwriting, by the way, is surprisingly legible for someone in a hurry. It’s hurried but legible, and just so you know, the r in mascarpone comes after the second a instead of the first. I can certainly understand the confusion of marscapone vs. mascarpone, the former reminiscent of at least one mobster.

Speaking of Italy, here’s the word on tiramisu: Its translation is “pick me up,” and it was created as an aphrodisiac and served to the brothel clientele of a town called Treviso. The point was to keep everyone invigorated and eager to pay for the next pleasure-seeking session. Nothing like rich, sweet, caffeinated food to accomplish that with no complaints!
 
So, it’s the end of the year, in the way my culture measures years. I’ve tried to glean some message from your lost list and this is what I’ve come up with: Every lost thing becomes something to be found. Every found thing becomes something to be lost. Like Janus, the Roman god of doors, gates, and transitions, we stand in the world facing forward and back, future and past, planted yet divided, encompassing the is and isn’t. Your list flew from your hand or your pocket or your purse and landed in the winter tangle of my Virginia creeper where I spotted it hugging the fence. Perhaps it called out “Pick me up!” or perhaps I was feeling the overabundance of recent lost things and needed a found thing, even if it was two coupons and a grocery list. Pieces of paper blown across sidewalks and into bushes and yards have always interested me. Every one represents an expectation or a transaction. Sometimes it’s a receipt from the cleaners but sometimes…sometimes it’s a confession of love or a short work of fiction or a kid’s drawing of the planet we call home.

How many things—entities, beings, ideas, convictions and hopes have you lost this year? And how many new ones found? I won’t keep a lost list, not on this late afternoon in late December when the light itself is lost and the temperature is dropping and my family has gone home and my dear friends and I are getting older by the minute, losing sight and hearing and even smell, yet alive still, mostly alive. A found list, though. That’s different. It starts this way:
                                    Satisfaction in being by myself
                                    New trails to walk at the end of the day
                                    A story to tell
                                    The ability to be patient
                                    A way to express what’s on my mind
                                    Cookies on my front porch
                                    A feral cat under the house
                                    A pair of scratched Ray-Bans
                                    2 coupons and a grocery list

What have you lost this year? What have you found? Keep in touch.
4 Comments
Carol Edelstein
12/31/2020 06:26:03 pm

Delightful! Thank you for this lovely essay. Reading you is a beautiful way to word my way into 2021.

Reply
Julia Erhart
1/2/2021 02:31:34 pm

Hi Margie, this one's a ripper. Your best yet! Love, your sis

Reply
Elena
1/2/2021 02:35:52 pm

Lovely post, Margie. Thank you! Here is a couple of my thoughts on things lost and found...

One sign of the year that just ended, or a big part of it, has been lost face masks. More specifically, masks lost along hiking trails. Hikers are, generally, environmentally conscious people that don’t litter on trails and try their best to leave no trace. But being human, they sometimes loose stuff or accidentally drop things, such as water bottles, tissues, wrappings of Cliff and Luna bars, earrings, even (sadly) wedding rings. 2020 added face masks to the list of things commonly lost along hiking trails. The change has been a gradual one: in March/April – no lost masks; in July/August – a few lost masks; in October/November/December – lots of lost masks. My observation is that towards the end of the year the number of lost masks vastly surpassed that of all other above-mentioned items combined.
In my opinion, it has been a good change. It means that more people wear masks. People have been very courteous, pulling up masks when passing others on trails. Sometimes that produced slightly comical results. Once, a lady stopped and stepped off a trail to let me pass. I said (through my mask), “Good morning!”, to which she replied (though her mask), “You are welcome!” 😊
We wear masks in our lives, we always have, though before 2020 it wasn’t so obvious. We take them off when we are around our close ones, so they have a privilege to see us “as is”, with all our pimples, wrinkles, unwanted facial hair and imperfect teeth. And no make-up. We put them back on when we go out into the world. In 2020, going out into the world shrank considerably for everybody, and for some even more than for others.
I think this last strange and often uncomfortable year when we started wearing physical masks (and this is not nearly over yet) better showed ourselves who we really are. A paradox? Not really…

Reply
Jean Rukkila
1/7/2021 11:36:14 pm

You.

Reply



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