Strange Things Are Happening Every Day

The other night I opened a can of soup, put it in a pot on the stove, fired it up, and started reading the paper. When it comes to cooking, I usually don't, so I'm a stickler for following directions. The can said to stir the soup occasionally, so that's what I did. Even with something as simple as soup, I'm still kind of mesmerized that through the marvel of heat (even electrically-generated) something that doesn't look too appetizing (a can of bean soup) can be transformed into something eminently delectable within minutes. So I stirred the pot, thrilled that the gunk would soon be so tasty, and delighted that in doing so, I was treated to emanations of heat to warm me up on a cold, snowy winter's night. I had places to go and people to meet that evening, so I cranked up the heat on the burner a notch or two to speed the process along and make the kitchen less chilly. After reading the local crime blotter and the death notices, and skimming the sports page to see which page I would devour word for word while I ate, I knew the time must be right for the soup. The heat off the stove was a warm blast as I stood above the teeming soup. Well, not quite teeming. I was surprised it wasn't bubbling a bit, and even more surprised when I spooned some out and it wasn't steaming. Not trusting my eyes, I bent over a little bit and contemplated tasting the soup, to make sure it was done. I caught myself as my face got closer to the spoon: don't be deceived Dan, how often have you put your lips to something that didn't seem that hot only to end up seconds later howling and cussing with a burning tongue? This time, however, it was not my tongue that got burned, but, figuratively, my eyes--as I hunkered down over the pot, I saw that the burner behind the one where my pot of soup sat was electrically aglow; the soup sat on an un-burning burner. I had put the pot on one burner and turned a different burner on.

Twenty-five years ago in college, I started to write a short story about two neighborhood teen-age boys who work up some mischief the night before their street's annual block party. The narrator is an older neighbor who has recently gone blind. For the first time since he went blind, he is alone; his wife has hesitantly gone away for the weekend, having been convinced by him that he'll be okay. In the course of his reveling in his newly re-gained independence, he "witnesses" what the boys do. As the evening begins he sets out to make some hot dogs for himself. After about twenty minutes or so, he realizes he has placed the pot of weiners on one burner, but turned on a different one. No big deal for a blind man.

However, though I am colorblind, and I've recently taken to wearing my first ever pair of eye glasses, I am not blind, so my gaffe is rather inexcusable. As of yet, twenty-five years and counting, I have not finished the short story. I know exactly how it ends, with the blind man chuckling to a neighbor, "Yep, with everything you've got." It's the middle of the story I'm still working on. Well, intermittently working on. Every few years or so I haul the story out, re-read what I have, still liking most of it, tinker with it, push it along a little more, but then end up putting it away again. Now I've written ten-page stories in one sitting. I've completed several stories with the same teenaged boys, using the street in all sorts of symbolic ways--I can start and finish a story in relatively short time--but this particular story remains in process. Each time I work on it, I feel like I am not quite ready to finish it, like it needs to germinate more, or maybe I need to mature more.

With my bumbling soup-making experience the other night, maybe I'm another click closer, but I don't know. In the story, when the man realizes his error, he laughs and takes the time to wax philosophic about whether it's better to rectify the situation by placing the pot of hot dogs on the already hot burner, or to turn off the one burner and light the correct one. My reaction wasn't quite so stoic. With burning eyes rather than a burning tongue, I howled and cursed my stupidity. Maybe because I had places to go and people to meet, but also maybe because I'm still me, I wasn't bemused but pissed. Maybe I'm still years from being able to honorably get inside that old blind man's thoughts and sensibilities.

Other questions linger, though.

Is there some kind of sudden onset culinary dyslexia disorder that prompts chefs to irrationally pinch confectioner's sugar into beef stew and dollop salt into souffles (or whatever an egregiously representative cooking faux pas would be), a psychological sort of kitchen counterpart to baseball's Steve Blass/Sax syndrome, where star players all of a sudden can't accurately throw a ball sixty feet anymore? With my limited cooking expertise I doubt I would qualify for such a diagnosis, but still.

Art imitates life all the time, and certainly life is capable of imitating art, but what about one particular person's life imitating his own putative art, especially twenty-five years after the initial creation of that putative art? Surely that must raise some beguiling questions, no? Are there subsconscious creatures at work in all of us, concocting odd scenarios for us, trying to make us see deeper meanings in our lives, or merely toying with us for their version of shits and giggles? Finish the story, learn to cook, get your head out of your ass, align your ying and yang, contemplate balance, call for pizza delivery?

Or was this all just a one-off goof, fodder for nothing more than blogging?

I don't know. I'll keep you posted if trends develop.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe-Strange Things Happening Every Day