Outtakes
, I sent him the accumulation at the bottom of the last screen-page of
Room Temperature
, written on Father’s Day, 1989.
three days a week oruhizzing bubbling llbbing e
to finish the article.
turned above her, ent
Bugdolatry
mere six months oldbshe had fallen aseep sucking from a
l;home
hs etcu the Bug, inconceivably grown, Everything wen
s’
owl and nrtz t, which a plastic bagn
mpinrotn
own mouth: eventually, after ten minutes of
:
in the grass in
direct sun in a stream
unpleasant tickling of the sharp stream of water against the roof
of your mouth, a stream fin
sensation of the Bug must have felt as she drew in the warm milk from her plastic bottlehthour r, against the roof
of your
had it as: the and saliva combined, a taste similar to et
o prove that ere
fall overand tacar
] , some change and rubber bands at th bottom; and the very
eom
hourfr: chewed on for several weeks while writing;
el s and several ix
hterd
from i once to
, ginn
But I had the bug!
for larice or sehalf r
k crichad changedexpectedhl
but I had the
Bugtact
my energies, colliding with my uncertainty about mlack of
(1989)
Recipe
The Monroe County Library System, of Monroe, Michigan, asked for a recipe to include in a collection of “Favorite Recipes by Favorite Authors,” entitled Read ’em and Eat.
Take one ingot of unsweetened Baker’s chocolate, remove the paper, and drop it in a tiny saucepan settled over an adjustable heat-source. Then unfold one end of a brand-new silver bar of unsalted Land O Lakes butter and cut a chunk off roughly comparable to the piece of Baker’s chocolate, which has by this time begun to smear slightly. (An old stick of butter has too much refrigerator flavor in its exposed end.) The butter will melt faster than the chocolate. Entertain yourself by breaking the ingot of chocolate into its two halves and pushing the halves and the subsiding chunk of butter around with the tip of the butter knife. Then abandon the butter knife and switch to a spoon. When the unmelted chocolate is no more than a small soft shape difficult to locate in the larger velouté, shake some drifts of confectioners’ sugar into the liquid. You’re aiming for a bittersweet taste, a taste quite a bit less sweet than ice cream — so sprinkle accordingly. But you’ll find that a surprising amount of sugar is necessary. Stir idly. If the mixture becomes thick and paste-like, add another three-eighth-inch sliver of butter; to your relief, all will effortlessly reliquefy. Avoid bubbling or burning the mixture, which can now be called sauce. Turn off the heat, or turn it down so low that you don’t have to worry about it. Spoon out some premium plain vanilla ice cream. Lately this has become hard to find — crowded out by low-fat premiums and Fragonard flavors. But you want the very best vanilla ice cream available in your area; you have to have that high butterfat content for it to be compatible with the chocolate sauce. Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for. Once cooled, it will make a nice sound when you tap it with a spoon. If you want more tappable chocolate sauce and you have already covered your scoop or scoops of ice cream with a complete trelliswork, simply turn over one of the scoops and dribble more over the exposed underside. Eat with haste, because premium vanilla ice cream melts fast. Refrigerate the unused sauce right in the original saucepan, covered with tinfoil, with the spoon resting in it; that way, when you put it back on the heat-source, you’ll be able to brandish the whole solidified disk of chocolate merely by lifting the spoon. It looks like a metal detector.
(1991)
Ice Storm
I grew up in Rochester, so I should probably know what an ice storm is, but what has just happened here is brand-new in my experience. On the night of March 3, a Sunday, some sort of strange, gentle, superchilled rain came down over a large part of western New York. It coated every power line with a perfect cylinder of ice nearly an inch thick, from which ideally spaced icicles, like the tines on a soil rake, descended, all exactly the same length. The freeze held through early Tuesday. On Monday, if you looked out any window for a few minutes, you were certain to see, against a background of glittering Ace combs, the bough of a tree come crashing down. There was no wind, nor had there been any the first night. It seemed more a demonstration of the patient principles of candlemaking than a storm. At a distance, the ice effects were white, but when you drew close enough to a tree to be surrounded by the continual worry-bead crackling of its fretwork, and stood there, ready to duck at any moment, you saw that it had become incorporated into a clear and disturbingly clinical arrangement of pristine pipettes and test tubes, each holding a once-natural element of the organism — a bud, a twig, one of those perky citizens you had been counting on to function as usual in a few months — in an elaborate cryopharmaceutical experiment.
I drove down the streets today (Tuesday) feeling at times that it was all very familiar, that Ansel Adams calendars had prepared me for this, but then, jumping out again and again from the arty, grainy black-and-white photography that slowly moved past was a sudden apricot-colored splash of discomfort where a bough had torn itself free or a trunk had split in half. On the streets I’ve seen, half of the good big trees are ravaged. The younger ones, planted about twenty years ago to replace all the elms, are especially painful broken sights. Conifers did somewhat better than deciduous trees. The tall weeping spruce next to our house weeps more than usual but has lost no limbs. Stuck high up in it before the storm was a plastic dragon kite, which we had repeatedly tried and failed to extricate; the morning after the storm, it lay in two pieces on the grass. My wife said, “Well, at least something good has come out of this.” I said yes, it was like bombing all of Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein. She reminded me of Frost’s poem about whether the world will end in fire or in ice. And if we hadn’t just flown more than a hundred thousand sorties over a distant place, I would give in more to grief about all these trees, but in the face of that devastation this sort of rare and unmalicious natural catastrophe, in which nobody dies, and some leftovers spoil in some refrigerators, and people go out on tentative camera expeditions to pass the time until the cable TV comes on again, makes me think that we over here have gotten off very easily. We deserve at least this much ice after that much fire. Many of the trees will grow back, after all, as from a bad pruning. As they thaw now, the water is hearteningly visible, hurrying along the bark underneath the ice layer, like blood.