The memory is of my grandmother, dropping a frozen strawberry into a glass of white wine.
Or maybe it was champagne.
Whichever it was it was filled to the brim and she drank it to the bottom, devouring the berry, laughing, alongside my Bompa, who drank -- did he have a glass of the same, or was it one of his martinis? Carefully created, as my father recently reminded me, by gently stirring the gin ("so as not to bruise it") and pouring it into a martini glass that had been prepared with a twist of lemon, expressed around the lip. If there was vermouth at all it was a trace of vapour only, released when he passed the open bottle over the glass like a priest blessing the saved with his smoky incensor.
They drank theirs while I had my root beer float and we watched the Sound of Music curled up on their davenport. (There were no couches in my grandmother's house, but there were three davenports.) When the credits rolled my grandmother sang "Climb Every Mountain", lustily smiling through her song, knowing every word, hitting every note.
They said it would come like this: memories welling up from the dark earth long after it was carefully tamped down. This one was triggered as I tore through the index of Ginette Mathiot's classic I Know How to Cook, recently released in translation by Phaidon, and spotted the strawberry recipe. I was looking for ways to prepare the abundance of celeriac (p. 523), turnips (p. 559), carrots (p. 520) and squash (no squash. squab. but no squash) that I've acquired from my winter CSA share.
I'm pretty sure this is a cry I've been cradling in reserve ever since we drove the distance this last week to Omaha and I stepped into Mr. Hoo's dying grandmother's room, turned off the fierce fluorescent over her head and pulled open the curtains to allow the morning light into the room.
I was startled by the hydrangea bush that stood in the sunlight just beyond the glass: dried, brown, done. Close kin to the blue bush that bloomed bright outside my grandmother's window this last summer, while she made her last ascent.
Strawberries Marinated in Wine fraises au jus Scant 4 1/4 cups strawberries Superfine sugar to taste 1/2 bottle red wine, maraschino liqueur or Champagne, chilled
Prepare several hours in advance. Wash, drain and trim the strawberries and place in a bowl. Add sugar to taste and just cover the fruit with wine, maraschino liqueur or Champagne. Macerate in the refrigerator for several hours before serving.
Practice this thought now; turn it over in your mind; fabricate a muscle memory inside your imagination. Because when the day comes and you approach the bed of the dying your first impulse will be to say nothing. She may almost certainly say nothing to you. You may sit stiffly and look on politely before you look away. It may seem impolite to stare as her breath grows labored and her eyes grow wide.
If you have practiced this thought the compulsion might come to you easily, and gently you will take her hand. You will stroke her skin with its sheen like rice paper; you might fear that it will tear like tissue beneath your fingertips. If there's lotion close you might think to warm some in your hands and spread it on her thirsty skin.
Address her shoulders, her sternum. She may respond with a sigh of ease. She may not.
Rub her tired traveler's feet. They are dry and turned in on themselves and weary.
Practice this thought now, because the dying need to be touched like the newly born do. The dying need to know we're near.
It may be impossible to find a decent meal on Thanksgiving in America.
Or, at the very least, in Omaha, Nebraska.
Unless of course you've planned ahead. If you've shopped in the days before for the bird that you will stuff and truss and the cranberries that you will simmer until they pop and the Karo syrup that you will transform into the inexcusably sticky mess of a pecan pie that is the hallmark of a successful Thanksgiving -- if you've done all this then you will eat.
But if you descend out of the long dark drive from Chicago upon family tired and worn from a month of hospital attendance and the tired resignation that the patient has decided she is done, then you will find refrigerators empty and grocery stores closed and everyone too busy with the business of keeping her company on the long road home too worry too much about the rest of it.
Last night I missed the Moth StorySLAM by a whisker. Through a series of misfires my companion and I got on the long rainy road into the city too late, and the show had sold out by the time we arrived. Every month Moth hosts a StorySLAM in Chicago, where you throw your name into a hat and, if it’s selected, you have five minutes to tell your story. I’ll try again next month. The theme will be different so the story will be fresh. This time around it was “Blunders.”
This was the story I carried rain-soaked into the city.
My ex- likes the tell the story of the time he spent in Kenya as a kid, when his father was on a meteorological mission, seeding clouds to turn hail into rain. And he likes to tell about how, when he returned with his family to Clarksville, Tennessee, he would entertain the kids in the playground with stories of the zebras and the lions and the giraffes; with stories of the bush babies whose many eyes blinked and glowed in the headlights as the family returned in the dark to the tea plantation they rented while they were there.
He liked to tell the kids about the monkeys that lived in his backyard.
All this led to a Parent-Teacher conference in which his teacher pointed out to his mother that, while B was bright boy, he had an overactive imagination, and he was he was in the habit of telling lies. For example: he liked to tell the students that he had monkeys in his backyard.
To which his mother replied: “We’ve just returned from Kenya. We had monkeys in our backyard.”
I loved this story; I loved how the man I loved was unjustly accused and exonerated in the end. I loved it until I learned that I had married a liar, and a wondered then if it was a plant, a decoy, designed to distract me from all the stories that were untrue.
When we finally arrived at that awkward middle place between deciding to divorce and signing the decree, we had dinner one night at one of our favorite places, a cheap sushi joint on Broadway in Seattle. Over dinner he told me he was sorry; over dinner he told me everything would change; over dinner I told him I didn’t believe him. Then I asked for the check.
They brought us a couple of fortune cookies with the bill and B cracked his open. He laughed a little and handed it to me with a tear in his eye. It read: “A liar is never believed, even when he tells the truth.”
But this story isn’t about that blunder. This story is about when his family was still in Kenya, and his mother wanted to ask the academic wives over for tea. She asked the gentleman servant, a man named Jealous whose services came with the house they had rented for the season, to help her prepare a place for tea by clearing a small overgrown area near the house, under an ancient spreading shade tree; a tree that had been planted by some British colonial who knows when, or maybe had been left to stand when the other trees were cut down around it. A tree that offered shade from the hot African sun. A perfect place for tea.
“Clear it?” he asked, concern in his voice.
“Yes, cut it.” she said.
“Cut it?”
“Yes: cut it down.”
She left him to his task, which he approached reluctantly. She returned later to find he had cleared the grasses away, and then he sharpened his axe. He took his axe to the trunk of that ancient spreading shade tree.
I left for D.C. on Wednesday knowing very little about the Terra Cotta Warriors that I was going to see on display at the National Geographic Museum, and I returned home knowing just a little bit more than that.
The only difference between then and now is that now I have pictures, and having pictures means that I have a responsibility to say something that matters about these guys.
So I went digging and this is what I found -- sources vary and are cited below. I offer them to you now along with an apology if any of this is old news:
Long before the Warriors were “discovered” in Lin Tong in 1974, locals told stories of unfortunate ancestors “who dug too deeply in the earth and saw the face of a ghost, half-hidden in dirt,” and were plagued with bad fortune for their trouble. [1]
The farmers who were sinking the well that brought the warriors to light were at first ignored by local officials. The bureaucrat who was called in to examine the torso hauled in to county headquarters by Farmer Yang (which was no mean feat -- each Warrior weighs between 300 and 400 pounds) left it languishing in a back storeroom for some time before he declared that it was maybe 100 years old and not all that interesting. By chance an archaeologist from Xi’an heard about the discovery and recognized its significance.
The tomb was sacked and burned by enemies of the state before it was completed. The Warriors were buried in the warehouse where they were awaiting placement. It's believed that this is the reason several rooms of the tomb were found empty.
An elaborate river scene within the "entertainment center" of the Necropolis was, however, completed before the attack. According to the exhibit placard: "The longest hall takes the form of a river with a bank on each side, paralleling a river system above ground. Bronze birds, including cranes, swans, and geese were placed along the underground river's length. The 46 birds in the flock are all in naturalistic poses, each one slightly different."
The Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang or Shihuangdi, on whose behalf the 8,000+ warriors were interred, was the first emperor China ever had.
According to Chinese officials, his burial chamber has yet to be excavated.
Under his rule the entire country took on the name of his home state Qin (because all of China had in fact been swallowed by Qin -- pronounced “chin”), and it’s thought that the western name “China” is probably derived from this place name.
Historians were largely unkind to Emperor Qin and described him as a hard ass who distrusted scholars and burned books. Some suggest that this description was politically motivated and not entirely true.
Under the first Emperor’s rule weights, measures, language and currencies were standardized -- and coin standards included some crazy shapes like spades and blades, in addition to the traditional circular form which ultimately won out.
Emperor Qin started construction on the Great Wall of China. Most of the “pounded earth and stone” that comprised his Wall was later replaced by brick in the Ming Dynasty, but some fragments of the original structure still remain.
His terra cotta soldiers were not, in fact, individualized portraits, but: "an early feat of mass production: a small and quite limited repertoire of body parts were joined together in a multitude of combinations, with details worked by hand afterwards. Then the whole figures were painted. Endless variety of costumes, hairstyles, hand positions or facial features was therefore possible, but in no way were they individual portraits. The clay warriors were stamped with the name and unit of the foreman of a group of workmen, as part of an elaborate system of quality control." [2]
Jane Portal also reports in The first emperor: China's Terracotta Army that:
The First Emperor wanted to live for ever and go on ruling eternally. Following several assassination attempts on his life, he tried to achieve physical immortality with the help of alchemists who prescribed pills and potions featuring large amounts of mercury. He also sent groups of envoys to the mythical isles of the immortals off the east coast to seek elixirs of immortality.
Given that, I shouldn’t have been so easily awed by the findings of researchers at Stanford who recently ran a chemical analysis of the Chinese Purple pigment used on the Terra Cotta Warriors -- a rare, synthetically derived pigment that some have speculated was received in a trade with the Egyptians long before the Silk Road became established. Please bear with the lengthy excerpt -- this is fascinating:
In order to address these questions [of provenance], we re-examined the chemistry and the morphology of purple pigments found on one of the Qin Terracotta warriors. By combining our findings of the technology used in the synthesis of Chinese Purple with existing archaeological evidence, we conclude that Taoist alchemists invented this pigment as well as the related pigment Chinese Blue independently from any Egyptian influence.
These chemical maps and maps of the crystallographic orientation suggest that Chinese Purple was synthesized using lead flux melting, a process very similar to that for glass making. Diffusion of heavy elements such as Ba, and even Cu, is very sluggish even at 1000 C and limits the grain sizes in a solid state synthesize to a few microns, as is frequently seen for solid state synthesis of high Tc superconductors which have similar heavy ion composition. However, if the pigment crystallites grew from a melt, as Pb elemental map and the grain growth morphology suggest, then the grain growth kinetics are not governed by diffusivity of individual ions, but by the flow due to thermal convention, which is significantly higher than solid state diffusion. Therefore, the presence of large pigment crystallites (20μm-50μm), in conjunction with the growth morphology suggest that pigment crystals grew in presence of liquid and probably even precipitated from a melt.
(...)
Historical records suggest that Taoist alchemists are responsible for the making of these barium-lead-containing glasses. It is known that jade holds a special status in Taoism.
Taoist believed that jade, which they considered to be a magical material, not only held the power to preserve a human body and spirit (Needham and Lu 1974) but also was an elixir for achieving physical immortality (Ko 320). In the pursuit to understand and obtain such a precious material, the Taoist monks started to synthesize it themselves. Several records in ancient Chinese texts mentioned Taoist monks making jade (glass) by fusing stones. As recorded in “Lun Heng” (Wang 27-97), “the Taoist monks used to make five-colored jade with five stones....” More importantly, it also mentioned that glass could achieve a certain appearance when different raw materials were added during the process, “Suihou (the duke of Sui) made beads out of several ‘medicines’ which were more shiny and appealing.”
As we know today, the barium glass has a larger refractive index than that of a normal glass. This would give barium glass a certain turbidity and a jade-like appearance. Glass (Jade) makers would have found this by trial and error. Barium minerals, such as Barite (BaSO4) or Witherite (BaCO3), are reasonably common in central China. This mineral is unusually heavy and forms “appealing” crystals, so the Chinese, as careful observers and curious chemists, would no doubt have found and experimented with it. In this process of imitating jade, they discovered the recipe of the barium containing glass. Then, the copper minerals, Malachite (Cu2(CO3)(OH)2) or Azurite (Cu3(CO3)2(OH)2), could be added later to obtain different jade colours. We believe that this experimentation led to the eventual discovery of Chinese Purple. [3]
The researchers report that the Chinese Purple wasn’t used much before this occasion, and was seldom seen afterward, which they suggest is an indication of the declining tide of Taoism.
Before then, however, as Jennifer Oldstone-Moore reports in her book on Taoism: origins, beliefs, practices, holy texts, sacred places, Taoist "individuals knowledgeable in techniques for achieving immortality -- the fang-shih, or ‘gentlemen with recipes’ -- were hired by imperial courts to reveal their secrets.” [4]
And so it would seem that Qin contracted with Taoist fang-shih to act as celestial tailors -- clothing his warriors in immortality to ensure his rule for all eternity.
Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor National Geographic Museum 1145 17th Street NW, Washington DC Exhibition open daily from 10AM to 6PM Hours extended to 9PM on Wednesdays, and the first 200 to line up by 5.30 will receive free entrance at 6PM.
p.s. The invitation to attend the bloggers’ preview of the exhibit was my excuse to have a lovely play day in the middle of the week in Washington D.C., and the excuse came my way only because my Twitter buddy @bobcatrock spotted the open call for bloggers on Flickr and passed the link my way.
Thank you thank you thank you, Mr. Bobcat. As excuses go, it was one of the best.
The wise have likened jade to virtue. For them, its polish and brilliancy represent the whole of purity; its perfect compactness and extreme hardness represent the sureness of intelligence; its angles, which do not cut, although they seem sharp, represent justice; the pure and prolonged sound, which it gives forth when one strikes it, represents music. Its color represents loyalty; its interior flaws, always showing themselves through the transparency, call to mind sincerity; its iridescent brightness represents heaven; its admirable substance, born of mountain and of water, represents the earth. Used alone without ornamentation it represents chastity. The price that the entire world attaches to it represents the truth. To support these comparisons, the Book of Verse says: "When I think of a wise man, his merits appear to be like jade."
p.s. yeah: I'm not sure that "wise man" counts as number eleven, but Confucius said there were eleven virtues so there have to be eleven virtues, right?
Converging on Washington D.C. to have lunch with your big sister and your little brother and fill your lungs with oxygen-rich big gulps of laughter pretty much does the trick.
And okay, to D's point, maybe not the best day ever; but almost definitely the best Wednesday ever. Rounded out nicely by dinner with an old friend and a bliss-filled few hours at the Phillips Collection, on top of the whole National Geographic thing.
Plus the kindly Kimpton upgrade to a freakin' suite at the Hotel Helix (where this shot was taken) didn't hurt.
