Dutch Oven

We stopped in Fishkill, NY on the way and ate at the Tomato Cafe, me in direct sunlight because the umbrella was immovable in its concrete shoe. A frittata is an omelet that costs $3 more. My ex-girlfriend Genevieve moved to St. Louis for law school and though she had more than a quarter century of 17th street soot in her tear ducts, the moment she skedaddled from NYC she started drinking milk and eating cookies. “Are you happy?” I’d asked her on the cellphone a couple of weeks earlier. She took a long time to answer, not because she was struggling with the content of the question but because she was trying to recall the texture of the ground beneath my feet that a question like that would emerge from. I was luxuriating in that exact same pause, Saturday at the Tomato Cafe in Fishkill, NY, on the way. My frittata came with three fillings that I’d selected from a list of seventeen: applewood bacon, crimini mushroom and green pepper.

E. had convinced me with the lure of a heap of leaves the size of the Hudson Valley and the prospect of summiting Bear Mountain’s ass to drive us to Joan Didion’s estate sale. She’s like Moby Dick, you know, you don’t actually have to read her. All you have to do is believe that the distortions you inherit from gossip and allusions are the important part and the work itself is already a relic beside its own reputation. Writing that is upsetting because Moby Dick is my favorite book. So, yeah, I read about one single essay of Didion’s and I had the nerve to teach it too, the one about her leaving New York which didn’t really resonate with me, if that’s what I’m supposed to be getting off on, because I’m from here. Still, maybe I don’t read just to tickle the meloncholy of my attention. It’s like when folks complain about a novel and say they just don’t relate to the characters. Like, you live in SoHo honey, and you cracked open a novel to make friends? 

I’m trying to educate myself, with the help of my own friends. We got a nice spot on Union Street away from the meters and walked the couple of deliriously charming Hudson blocks to the auction house with forty-five minutes till closing time (I had really dragged out the Bear Mountain part to the annoyance of my car mates but it was my minivan). “Welcome back,” said the woman at the front desk. Fashion goes a long way. So we looked at the offerings: art, stained chairs, books and silver. I inquired after the dutch oven which the nice and patient man in a white cardigan (Aaron?) warned me was being sold “as is” as if anybody would want this particular deep red Le Creuset with burned-in stew lines for any other reason than “as” it “is”. My friend Hannah was there, a real reporter, and she did her research. She told me they didn’t wash the blankets but they did polish the silver. I know it wasn’t a museum exhibit but to me it was a museum exhibit about bodily death. This could be all my grandmother’s crap and I was really devastated seeing all my grandmother’s crap after she died and I think that’s the point. I want that to be the point. It reminded me of the very upsetting David Bowie Lives exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum a few years ago. It was a fun exhibit but. No he doesn’t. 

We walked to the river and the sunset was so Japanese it made me think of this book I had read once that had a sideways story in it about objecthood and place and maybe it also has something to say about capitalism. There was this temple in Japan they wanted to move to lay down these train tracks instead. And they hired an English firm to do it. These English people come in and start painstakingly hauling each beam and stone from the old temple to the new site. The Japanese come in and say what’s taking so long. We’re painstakingly hauling each beam and each stone. Forget that, they tell the contractor: put up the same temple, that’s what we’re asking you for. You can toss that old wood, it’s rotted anyway. And sure enough you can visit the temple today on a brand new high speed train and it says twelve hundred years old on it even though some of the paint still smells and it’s just as holy. We watched the sunset mop up its splatter and walked back to the car, drove home through the night arguing about Malcolm X and when I finally got through my front door and unloaded my pockets of acorns I was shocked to find I had Joan Didion’s dutch oven on my stovetop: just as round and just as red.