The Vultures and I

Upstairs at my desk before a eucalyptus speckled sky, two enormous trees sheltering the now quiet street in whose branches hours ago sat two vultures, hunched, black, and dour as old world Protestants, waiting out the rain, and I shared their patience on my walled in patio below reclining on a wooden chair with a glass of white and a New Yorker magazine while rain sprinkled my toes outstretched and not quite under the awning. But I am upstairs now and have just got a stock slowly, gently boiling: asparagus ends, fibrous chard stems, rinds of Parmesan, half a red onion, half a sliced potato, slender celery ribs and leaves, diamond-shaped spinach, dried rosemary, cloves of garlic, sizzled with butter and olive oil, and a bucket of water, strained it will be soup tonight. Sabbath was made for man, but Sundays was made for soup. In the morning I haunted restaurants and cafes of the 1930s to nearly present on 44th street in New York City via Vanity Fair, while afternoon saw me foraging for wild foods in Oxfordshire forests and Denmark’s seacoast with Jane Kramer via the New Yorker magazine mentioned above, who, when I just now left her, was scouting the sands. My imagination was far from this Third World camp of boredom my body must muddle through somehow. No, not an escape from reality; a thrusting to the inspiring mystery of words on a page, a world of meaning, creation’s throbbing spark. Fuck it all there’s nothing to do here. I welcome the storms, rain and wrack and ruin, the bubbling darkness and the pumping mist heaving over the mountains here. Reading is the door I sail through and leave this dull plain of car alarms and traffic and shopping malls that are always full. My mind warps and my soul shrivels every time I leave the house, so I elegantly order my inner world. At noon I folded the magazine, reheated an excellent chili I made days before, the very best chili I’ve ever eaten if truth be told, lightly sautéed red cabbage in water until tender and lavender, tossed it with sliced pear and radish, lemon juice, salt, pepper, rice vinegar, canola and walnut oil, and lemon zest, and poured a glass of white which I finished on the patio in the rain while the dour vultures waited for me to finish the foraging article, patient birds.