Sunday, February 27, 2022

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.  

  

4 comments:

  1. When I was young I had one taste of Dr pepper and decided that I did not like it! Then about 30 years ago I tried it again and now it is my absolute favorite drink in the world! Go figure.

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    1. Dear Unknown, Why are you unknown? You may now unmask. Have a Dr. Pepper on me.

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  2. I wonder if it is coincidence that pistacio is apparently always the last flavor to be finished off at the South Pole Station? Pistachio, the Rodney Dangerfield of ice cream flavors...

    (Thank you again, and as always, for these musings!)

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    1. Hey, David, nice to almost meet you. Are flavors
      in some sort of polar opposites to the north? I understand your mother is another pistachio fan.

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