attendant parts were always there, were they not? But we all have to learn how to use what we were born with for something other than the functional and the obvious. All of our bodies hold within them secret chambers and cells.
When I was growing up, the taste of pancakes meant the kind that my great-uncle made for me from Bisquick. If condensed cream of mushroom soup was the Great Assimilator, then this “instant” baking mix was the American Dream. With it, we could do anything. Biscuits, waffles, coffee cakes, muffins, dumplings, and the list continues to grow even now in a brightly lit test kitchen full of optimism. My great-uncle used Bisquick for only one purpose, which was to make pancakes, but he liked knowing that the possibilities, the sweet and the savory, were all in that cheery yellow box. Baby Harper wasn’t a fat man, but he ate like a fat man. His idea of an afternoon snack was a stack of pancakes, piled three high. After dancing together, Baby Harper and I would go into his kitchen, where he would make the Dream happen. He ate his pancakes with butter and Log Cabin syrup, and I ate my one pancake plain, each bite a fluffy amalgam of dried milk and vanillin. A chemical stand-in for vanilla extract, vanillin was the cheap perfume of all the instant, industrialized baked goods of my childhood. I recognized its signature note in all the cookies that DeAnne brought home from the supermarket: Nilla Wafers, Chips Ahoy!, Lorna Doones. I loved them all. They belonged, it seemed to me, to the same family, baked by the same faceless mother or grandmother in the back of our local Piggly Wiggly supermarket.
The first time that I tasted pancakes made from scratch was in 1990, when Leo, a.k.a. the parsnip, made them for me. We had just begun dating, and homemade pancakes was the ace up his sleeve. He shook buttermilk. He melted butter. He grated lemon zest. There was even a spoonful of pure vanilla extract. I couldn’t bring myself to call what he had made for us “pancakes.” There were no similarities between those delicate disks and what my great-uncle and I had shared so often in the middle of the afternoon. Leo told me that another word for pancakes was “flapjacks.” I couldn’t bring myself to call them that either, because “flapjacks” sounded to me like a euphemism for an uncircumcised penis (this objection I shared with Leo, which made him laugh and then, in typical male fashion, he asked me how many had I seen). I also didn’t like the word “flapjacks” because it tasted of sauerkraut (this objection I didn’t share with Leo, because how could I?). I settled on “griddle cakes,” two words that had no taste whatsoever. Voids.
Over the course of our almost eight-year-long relationship, Leo would understand that I had a sensitivity to words. He just never would understand why. He thought that I was too attuned to their sounds. Yes and no. He thought that I made too many associations between the words and tangential, wholly subjective concepts (see flapjacks) . Yes and no. He thought that I was clinically depressed. Leo thought everyone was clinically something. He was in his last year of medical school and had just finished his psych rotation when we first met. I had learned by then how to control my facial expressions. I no longer winced, for example, when I heard “prune” or “Powell” or “you” or any of the hundreds of words that I found literally distasteful. I couldn’t control, however, the cumulative effect of having to experience their incomings. So on those days when I had encountered too many of them, Leo would find that I was subdued and in search of a dark, quiet room. The opposite, of course, was also true (see walnut or elephant or candle or jogger) . My emotional lows and highs were therefore inexplicable and unpredictable to Leo.
Some people were smart like a diamond. Kelly, for example. Reflective, impressive clarity, beautiful to have around. When I was in college
When I was growing up, the taste of pancakes meant the kind that my great-uncle made for me from Bisquick. If condensed cream of mushroom soup was the Great Assimilator, then this “instant” baking mix was the American Dream. With it, we could do anything. Biscuits, waffles, coffee cakes, muffins, dumplings, and the list continues to grow even now in a brightly lit test kitchen full of optimism. My great-uncle used Bisquick for only one purpose, which was to make pancakes, but he liked knowing that the possibilities, the sweet and the savory, were all in that cheery yellow box. Baby Harper wasn’t a fat man, but he ate like a fat man. His idea of an afternoon snack was a stack of pancakes, piled three high. After dancing together, Baby Harper and I would go into his kitchen, where he would make the Dream happen. He ate his pancakes with butter and Log Cabin syrup, and I ate my one pancake plain, each bite a fluffy amalgam of dried milk and vanillin. A chemical stand-in for vanilla extract, vanillin was the cheap perfume of all the instant, industrialized baked goods of my childhood. I recognized its signature note in all the cookies that DeAnne brought home from the supermarket: Nilla Wafers, Chips Ahoy!, Lorna Doones. I loved them all. They belonged, it seemed to me, to the same family, baked by the same faceless mother or grandmother in the back of our local Piggly Wiggly supermarket.
The first time that I tasted pancakes made from scratch was in 1990, when Leo, a.k.a. the parsnip, made them for me. We had just begun dating, and homemade pancakes was the ace up his sleeve. He shook buttermilk. He melted butter. He grated lemon zest. There was even a spoonful of pure vanilla extract. I couldn’t bring myself to call what he had made for us “pancakes.” There were no similarities between those delicate disks and what my great-uncle and I had shared so often in the middle of the afternoon. Leo told me that another word for pancakes was “flapjacks.” I couldn’t bring myself to call them that either, because “flapjacks” sounded to me like a euphemism for an uncircumcised penis (this objection I shared with Leo, which made him laugh and then, in typical male fashion, he asked me how many had I seen). I also didn’t like the word “flapjacks” because it tasted of sauerkraut (this objection I didn’t share with Leo, because how could I?). I settled on “griddle cakes,” two words that had no taste whatsoever. Voids.
Over the course of our almost eight-year-long relationship, Leo would understand that I had a sensitivity to words. He just never would understand why. He thought that I was too attuned to their sounds. Yes and no. He thought that I made too many associations between the words and tangential, wholly subjective concepts (see flapjacks) . Yes and no. He thought that I was clinically depressed. Leo thought everyone was clinically something. He was in his last year of medical school and had just finished his psych rotation when we first met. I had learned by then how to control my facial expressions. I no longer winced, for example, when I heard “prune” or “Powell” or “you” or any of the hundreds of words that I found literally distasteful. I couldn’t control, however, the cumulative effect of having to experience their incomings. So on those days when I had encountered too many of them, Leo would find that I was subdued and in search of a dark, quiet room. The opposite, of course, was also true (see walnut or elephant or candle or jogger) . My emotional lows and highs were therefore inexplicable and unpredictable to Leo.
Some people were smart like a diamond. Kelly, for example. Reflective, impressive clarity, beautiful to have around. When I was in college
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