Potato Peeler

Many winters ago I received a holiday gift of an OXO vegetable peeler shaped like a Y from a vendor we worked with at the time. While I never owned a lot of kitchen doodads, this peeler was love at first sight and a love that has never dimmed. It changed the whole nature of potato peeling for me. 

Focus moved from the act of peeling to what might follow from there. What would be created and what level of perfection may the potato achieve. These were never the concerns at potato peeling in the past. It was necessary to focus on safety, reducing discomfort and successful completion of the job. 

About a year ago I accidentally left the peeler on a hot stove top and a part of the handle melted. The peeler became a less perfect to hold, the ding made it rough to touch. It was harder now to focus on the perfection after instead of the mundane act of peeling the potato. 

The arc of the OXO peeler’s life in my kitchen drawer is not that different from that of my own. I have brought joy to some in the past but after being dinged over the years the joy I might bring is subsumed by dealing with my imperfections. For some the peeler would have fallen to disuse by now or replaced even but I still hold it very dear; some in my life continue to cherish me dings and all. 

Interesting what thoughts might come to mind reading about the OXO peeler.

Imaginary Silver Ride

I imagine the scudding silver

of the rental car, zip across

the Golden Gate Bridge.

Had I been there tonight,

we would have held hands.

Stopped to look down

Into the starlit Bay.

The place we wanted to be

in youths that have long passed

The dreams that were meant 

not to be. Yet I caught glimpses

now and again, through eyes

of love and loss, in morning fog

and the against cloudless cerulean.

I imagine you past the other end

bridge of gold behind you, the 

silver dart of what remains ahead

of our lives in the last half.

Feeling Love

Recently while discussing her boyfriends and heartbreak with by young friend L, I found myself thinking about the nature of love and how the moments when I have most intensely experienced it bordered on pain. The birth of J was one of them. Holding her in my arms was a life changing experience. From being frail, vulnerable and unsure about what next in crumbling marriage, I went to feeling like I had some super-power that could not be contained. Yet there was no euphoria. A mundane analogy to describe it would be a dry faucet on a hot summer's day that suddenly starts to gush water furiously and will not stop. There comes a point after which thirst and need is satiated but the flood continues unabated. 

Thinking back that was my first contact with true love. It is hard to know what exactly to do with it. The second experience came much later in life and it was borne out of sharing the deepest pain, willingly letting myself experience another person's darkest days as if they were my own. Not knowing where exactly my life separated from theirs. There was a consuming sense of One much like the time I held the new born J to my heart. There was the same sense of invincible though the circumstances were very different. 

I was trying to explain to twenty year old L that it is not real love until you have experienced such connection with another person that it is no longer possible to separate part from whole; have no words to describe that limitless, unbounded feeling you experience because that person exists in your life.