M.E. Breen

Major life developments! I have a new job and I’m going back to college.

The new job is for a cooperative organic grocery store. It’s pretty great. I already felt like an insider at the store because I’d been shopping there for a long time, but it turns out the shopper is just an ice-skater swooshing along, all la dee dee, vegan Indonesian wrap and Pellegrino, la dee dum, California Complete Protein bread and nut butters. Well, hold on. I’m going to switch water metaphors, because a frozen lake full of sleeping frogs is nothing like the co-op. Let’s say the shopper is a surfer and the store is Atlantis.

There are no fish in the store because it’s a vegetarian co-op and this is a metaphor. When I picture Atlantis I think of graceful people in Roman Empire-type clothes riding around in chariots towed by dolphins. Instead of jewels the women wear starfish in their hair. The poor dress in seaweed rags and weave togas out of algae for the rich. A pair of jowly bottom-feeders guards the coral gates to the city. A handsome, green-haired youth can be glimpsed through an open window, reading by the light of a lantern fish. From time to time he scratches a note on his clam-shell paper with his shark-tooth pen. Senators walk along glittering paths of crushed abalone. Sea fans grow in geometric plots. Little Aquina, who will grow up to murder the leader of the opposition with a well-placed urchin spike and marry her brother, chases her pet otter through the kelp.

Ok, the co-op is nothing like that, either. The co-op might actually be the opposite of that. Metaphor fail! Too weird.

I’ll let Arcimboldo and Marvell do the work:

What wondrous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples fall about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine, and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

The workers at the co-op handle the fruit and vegetables with tenderness and awe, like jewels, or kittens. (Ah, now I know what I was trying for with Atlantis. It was all about the starfish, the living jewel.) The produce really is as beautiful as jewels, but it inspires a sort of calm reverence instead of avidity. There’s anticipation (of eating) but no anxiety. There is so much food, and such an array of food, and such irrefutable dirt-evidence that the food has in fact come from the earth, that it’s impossible to feel any sense of want at all. There you are at 7:30 in the morning, wearing fingerless gloves and listening to Sonic Youth, surrounded by the eternal abundance of the Earth. And, because you are setting out food for other people to eat, and only offering food that is ripe at that particular time of year, there’s a kind of patience to the whole undertaking. You are at a remove from your own desire. If I liked to cook instead of hating to cook, I think that is what I would like about it. But my kitchen is not an easy place for me to be at a remove from my own desire. Also, in my kitchen I’m responsible for taste outcomes, and with the produce that’s all on Demeter, and Demeter don’t care.

I haven’t been at the co-op long enough yet to know, but maybe this sense of patience is what makes it work.  Maybe the sense of connection to nature that the turnips impart extends to coworkers. I was in nutrition class this morning and I wanted to raise my hand. I had something cool to say about Weight Watchers and car advertisements. I felt so anxious to say it. My blood pressure was up. I was like that hyperventilating kid in the front row in grade school, except I was in the back row where there happens to be this one desk-chair contraption left over from a previous generation of lecture hall furniture that has a padded seat = very vital to middle-aged butt.

Anyway, I was in a froth to contribute to the discussion. An avidity. It wasn’t even a discussion. It was a lecture, and the teacher hadn’t yet invited our comments and questions. And when she did, and this kid who I happen to know just returned from Afghanistan and now works the overnight shift as a baggage handler at SFO and barely makes it alive to 8:00am class raised his hand with a shy darting motion like a mouse emerging from its hole in a field patrolled by hawks, my first thought was, No! It’s my turn!

Because I am so old and wise, I was observing my avidity and sort of laughing at it and holding it in, and also wondering whether I would feel the same way at co-op board meetings. Would I feel like I might die if I didn’t assert myself and establish my importance, my relevance to the proceedings, my unique offerings, or would all those things feel assured because I was among equals, and already a living creature of the earth?

It would be quite something if my urgency to learn could be separated from the urgency to show off my learning. My nutrition teacher says we should eat plants because each plant has developed its own tricks of survival, and those adaptations, the plant’s defenses against bugs, drought and monsoon, provide us unique and necessary combinations of nutrients. That makes me feel like I’m eating Superman, except he is always lifting buses, reversing the rotation of the Earth, etc, while the carrot quietly turns orange. Carrot, can I eat your patience?