Last night we ate one of my pedestrian suppers of spaghetti and meat sauce. Cooking the meat sauce required cutting an onion. Cleaning up after supper(trust me, I promise this is going somewhere), I turned on the garbage disposal and started carefully jamming the onion skins down the rubber mouth of the scary disposal monster.
As I’m listening to the grinding, hoping that the crunches I’m hearing are not one of my rings or a spoon or the sponge, I heard my father, who died almost ten years ago, reminding me about the dangers of onions in the garbage disposal. Then I remembered, no, he didn’t mean white onions; he meant green onions. From there, I faded to my first apartment, a newlywed, cooking one of my first dinners. I plunged my hand in the sink full of soapy water and came up with a bloody thumb, my bloody thumb. Drops of blood rained from my hand, pelting the frothy soap bubbles.
Then, I saw myself in a picture taken the night my father surprised my mother with her first (and only) mink stole. Thirty-three years ago. She was the last in her trio of friends to own a mink. It was, to her, a luxurious article she thought she would never own.
My father was wearing a suit. They were going out to dinner. My mother, so astonished, she’s actually covering her open mouth with both hands. Even though she has been dead now for twenty years, I heard the echo of her saying, “Oh, Johnny. You shouldn’t have.” The unspoken: “…but I am so thrilled you did” conveyed by the lilt in her voice and the delight in her eyes.
I flicked the disposal off. With its stopping, so did the swish of memories, like Ezra Pound’s, “In a Station at the Metro”: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough. Pound himself said of his “image poem”:
“I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”
Who knew sending onions down a garbage disposal would bring me to my parents? It was a moment; their petal faces on the wet black bough of memory. And my first thought, as I hurriedly dried my hands, was to look for a pen and my notebook. To capture what I could remember; to not lose my parents and this unexpected gift of them in the ordinary drudgery of dishwasher loading and towel folding and paper grading.
This, I believe, is why I write. It’s what makes me a writer. It’s what leads me to the keyboard, to the journal, to the notebook. God can set in motion the most mysterious workings to lead me to the most precious thoughts, but I have to show up. I have to pay attention.
I have to trust that even onions can lead to joy.
Christa’s latest novel Edge of Grace is available now!
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