The Choco-Toolbox
Goes without saying that kids are unhinged sugar freaks, that Halloween is the ultimate freak show, and that a pillowcase lumpy with candy offers irrefutable evidence: God exists and, indeed, provides. You just ring the doorbell and these wacky adults distribute Snickers and Smarties and Tootsie Pops? I’ll wear whatever costume you please. Let’s do this.
For all the glee of trick-or-treating, though, when I survey my lifelong relationship with free food in search of the earliest thrilling encounters, my mind settles not on Halloween but on Christmas—and Dotti’s chocolate.
At least I think her name was Dotti. She was my grandma’s friend, presumably from church. We must have met during a family trip to Connecticut, but I have no recollection of her wrinkled face or bouncing on her knobby knee. The only thing I remember—and how clearly I remember it—is the chocolate: made from scratch, poured into intricate molds, cooled and neatly wrapped.
Dotti’s gifts appeared beneath our tree every year. Once, I received a choco-Santa riding a choco-sleigh drawn by choco-reindeer. Another time, choco-livestock and a choco-tractor. Best was the carpenter’s miniature choco-toolbox complete with hammer, saw, plane, measuring tape, and protective goggles.
The toolbox was intended for eating, obviously, but first I enjoyed an hour sprawled on the floor, banging nails and cutting planks, lost in my labors. I’d scored “awesomer” gifts that morning—a soccer ball, some sci-fi books—yet none conferred a comparable sense of wealth. With that chocolate melting in my hands, I could build sailing ships and spacecraft, castles and palaces.
A fantasy, a future.
Anything.
Mom’s Garden
I’m tangled in trellis, in pea vines. I’m burrowing under the wide, rough zucchini leaves, nuzzling the carrot tops. I’m thick in the lettuce, deep in the chard. Juggling tomatoes and fumbling peppers. Harvesting delicacies at will.
Meanwhile my green-thumbed mother tends to a flower bed, tilts her watering can, pays the ravenous nine-year-old jungle explorer no heed.
Years pass. Taste of dirt, gulp from the hose, pesto and pasta primavera and tabbouleh with extra parsley. Now I’m a teenager, been puffing weed all the livelong day, a couple of cheeky brews with my buddies, typical midsummer Vermont nonsense, aimless fun and sunshine. A teenager kicking off sandals and strolling barefoot toward the garden, tiptoeing into the soft, dark soil.
“You have a nice afternoon at the lake?” my mother asks.
“Howdy friggin’ ho! These peas are amazing,” I reply, mouth full, faded brain close to certain that her question had to do with peas.
It did, didn’t it?
Mom asked about the peas, right?
Cuban Night
We entered the clearing, dropped our gear, cussed and sighed, agreed it had been another grueling push, then turned to the white farmhouse, each window glowing golden, floating on the dusk’s chilly blue. Ross, my traveling partner, a trusty pal who’d jumped at my idea to ski the length of the Green Mountains over the course of three weeks in January, wondered aloud whether we could immediately pitch the tent and start cooking our well-deserved mush of buttery noodles and tinned sardines, or if permission to camp was required.
I shrugged.
Knock, knock, knock.
A woman opened the door. A man stood behind her. They were elite chefs from Manhattan, and this was their second home, their rural getaway. “Tonight’s Cuban night,” the woman said. “If you’re hungry,” the man added.
We were beyond hungry: We were hunger. That was the goal, actually—not to burn five thousand calories a day but to get back to basics, to the primal foundation of our animal nature. The hunger was metaphysical, ontological. It was a form of capital-B Being.
Candles, bottles of wine. Fried plantains and black beans and crumbly fritters and chicken drenched in a tangy, smoky sauce. Thirds went down easy, ditto fourths. Finally, just shy of midnight, badly needing to step outside for a prolonged fart, I offered the sincerest thanks in the history of dining.
“Coffee will be on at the crack of dawn,” the woman said.
“Plus blueberry pancakes with plenty of maple syrup,” the man added.
Embassy Suites
Perhaps this isn’t the case at all Embassy Suites, but in Flagstaff, Arizona, between 5 and 7 pm, the hotel provides unlimited snacks and beer, gratis. I’ll repeat that: unlimited. Granted, I never imbibed more than three Michelobs and a cubic yard of Chex mix, but still. The possibility of unlimited is delectable.
I was twenty-three, finishing a stint working for the US Forest Service in a stand of old-growth ponderosa pines, commuting to the woods from the Suites six days a week. Earning thirteen bucks an hour, the federal government covering my expenses. Saving money and hoarding fat in anticipation of a lean winter: I’m gonna be a writer!
One evening the lounge was crowded with NASA engineers and scientists who were testing a Mars rover against the harsh deserts north of the city. I “bought” a few rounds, asked questions, and, buzzing after my third beverage, parted ways with a slew of corny jokes about the red planet. Back in Room 134, loafing on my queen-sized bed, trying to resist flicking through the cable garbage, it crossed my mind that those NASA dweebs, like me, had been getting tipsy on the taxpayers’ dime.
Chex mix in my pants pockets and the folds of the flame-retardant quilt, I felt patriotic, felt American.
Over-the-Counter Dumpster Diving
“What happens to the pastries that don’t sell?”
The young lady at the register winked and lowered her voice to a whisper: “Meet me in Dolores Park at 9 pm.”
Sure enough, she was waiting there two hours later, perched atop a concrete wall by the water fountains, flanked by bulging shopping bags. “Take your pick,” she said.
I grabbed a giant stack of quiches.
“No, really, take a bunch,” she insisted, loading me up with baguettes, premade salami sandwiches, Cobb salads in plastic containers, slabs of pound cake, cookies. “And come again next Tuesday.”
“Here?”
“Nah, pop in as we’re closing, and we’ll give it to you over the counter.”
That’s how it started: three years scraping by in the prohibitively spendy metropolis of San Francisco, during which I subsisted almost entirely on restaurant overflow. The young lady from the faux-Parisian café quit, but other employees were equally disturbed by the amount of food waste, and equally excited to solve the problem with my belly.
It was dumpster diving minus the dumpster, a miracle born of the dumbest system imaginable: Produce croissants for pennies, sling them for dollars, throw away dozens every night without substantially denting the profit margin. The situation got so out of control that I began wandering Mission Street on Saturdays, distributing loaves of bread to alcoholics and heroin addicts.
I shared a single, ancient bathroom with six roommates and feasted like French royalty.
Mark Zuckerberg owned a building nearby.
Glacier Lilies
Glacier lilies, also called avalanche lilies, are an early-spring wildflower in the Rockies. They’re delicious—sweet and slightly spicy, a vivid yellow flavor that follows months of white snow and gray sky on the tongue.
I drop to all fours.
I crawl farther into the hills.
I nibble the blossoms—ten, twenty, thirty—imitating my teacher, my hero, my guide, an omnivore attuned to the place, its seasons and cycles, its abundance and generosity: Ursus Americanus, the black bear recently roused from hibernation.
Pizza Kits
And now comes the virus, the pandemic, the apocalypse that isn’t an apocalypse yet totally feels like one when you’ve stopped hugging and can’t peer around the corner to the promised land of tomorrow. I’m thirty-five, residing in Colorado, a ski town at nine thousand feet. Definitely not going hungry—not even close—but scrawny as ever, scroungy as ever.
Accordingly, my mouth waters when I learn a local pizza joint has received a couple of big cash donations to help feed a hard-hit community. “Pizza kits” are available at no charge. Swing by with your mask on, snag a box of dough and sauce and cheese, bake a pie in your home oven. I agree with the hundreds of other beneficiaries that it’s truly beautiful, a nourishment at once physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
Solidarity. Mutual aid.
Yum.
On a drizzly, gloomy Friday—having prepared my pizza and gobbled my pizza and scanned the internet’s tragic news and wanted to puke and wanted to weep and worried about the status of people I know and worried about the status of people I don’t know and worried about my habit of worrying too much—I retreat to the couch with Seth Kantner’s book celebrating Arctic Alaska, Shopping for Porcupine. A quote leaps off the page and into the part of me that’s been aware since childhood, at a deep, somatic level, that we can’t eat coin, can’t munch Benjamins, can’t survive on fame or sexiness or praise, can’t pull nutrients from most of the crap society trains us to desire:
Iñupiaq riches were straightforward things, easy to grasp: Furs, skins, and fat meat were riches. Above those and bordering on magical were strength and endurance, a good rifle, and a good lead dog, possessions valued for acquiring more meat, furs, and skins.
The lines remind me of White Eskimo, a biography of the Danish adventurer-anthropologist Knud Rasmussen. I dig out a manila envelope of quotes stashed on my bookshelf and find the scrap of paper with the paragraph I copied down three years ago, forever ago:
When he mentioned that the Inuits’ “gums were always dry with smiling,” one elder from the northwestern rim of Hudson Bay commented: “Oh! You strangers only see us happy and free of care. But if you knew the horrors we often have to live through, you would understand, too, why we are so fond of laughing, why we love food and song and dance. There is not one amongst us but has experienced a winter of bad hunting, when many starved to death in front of our eyes.”
Scent of pizza pervading the house, I stare at the ceiling, remembering. Dotti, yes, I’m positive that was her name.
I’m glad my parents forced me to write thank-you notes all those Christmases growing up—to write and mail them promptly, before New Year’s, so there would be no confusion regarding my gratitude.
