Pistachio Ice Cream Revisited

Imagine placing a jar on a hill in Tennessee as in the Wallace Stevens poem Anecdote of the Jar. The jar took dominion. It tamed the wilderness. The scene was decontextualized as the hill became a table.

A hill of pistachio ice cream changed the table in my eyes and transported me. Enter Proust. I love ice cream, all flavors except those with nuts in them such as butter pecan or pistachio. Or so I had thought. I must have decided that over eighty-five years ago. My seven-year-old self was not to be trusted with such a momentous decision.

Why do we dislike certain foods, I ask you? I suspect my head did not consult my palate. Associative thinking, perhaps. Maybe my shoelace broke at that moment, or I was upset over the war in the Pacific. More likely my older brother hid my tennis ball.

I still have an aversion to butter pecan. But a pecan is not a pistachio. Up to now I have lived my life pistachio deprived. It may explain all my fiscal blunders. Now that I’ve discovered the pinch of pistachio in the creamy green almond pasture, anything can happen.

Forget everything I said about pistachio.

Researching all this, I discovered that it may be the almond that gets to me more than the pistachios. Almonds contain amygdalin which yields traces of cyanide when they are metabolized. I’d better watch out; I could be slowly committing suicide. I’ve always suspected a self-destructive streak. If the carbs don't get me, the amygdalin will.

The thing about pistachio is that it’s the only flavor that rhymes with mustachio. That’s a fact even though life doesn’t seem to rhyme anymore except with strife.

There is enough strife in nature, as my friend Roger once told me, with most animals dying by tooth or claw. It’s not for us to tame it. If I should go to that hill in Tennessee with a jar of pistachio ice cream, it would be to create a transient collage of disparate objects and then go home and lick it.