Pistachio

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 pistachio. Or so I had thought. I must have decided that over eighty years ago. My seven-or eight-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 had heard that breadlines were the headlines. More likely my older brother hid my tennis ball.

Up to now I have lived my life pistachio-deprived. It may explain everything. Now that I’ve discovered the nutty texture and pinch of almond in the creamy green pasture anything can happen.

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 eat it.