The cabbage onion
A tolerance bridge too far
At the end of the week (an artificial terminus to a human created slice of year), we of the marginally United States default to pizza.
Our household is no exception.
On Fridays I’d click the six familiar buttons as I did the long walk out of the hospital to my usual parking spot. I park facing the same mostly dead tree, the rising sun to my east, the bright glowing logo straight ahead. While the exact distance to and from the hospital doors and the employee spaces remains constant, it is always longer on the way out, as the sun or her memory set to my right.
Dominos was on the way - a two minute detour to swoop in and swoop home in a time when my person would call out from the balcony above
“You did it!!! You saved lives!!!”
In the summer heat when the sun and I both resist bed time, we’d start with a quick dip in the cool waters of the creek before backtracking to Whole Foods for an affordable pie and soak up the air conditioning and free cheese samples while we waited for a six dollar pie.
I’m a cheap date.
But now we live less than a block from two alternate pizza places - one that also has a killer salad. Our radius has contracted further, and times feel more desperate to vote local with dollars and waste much less fuel.
Also noteworthy - now that we are in our later 40’s, the volume of emails from our health insurance companies and local grocers feel insistent that the idea of adding more vegetables is no longer a sweet suggestion. It’s now prescriptive. Pepperoni is out, roughage is in. Fiber which somehow speeds and slows the gut whilst feeding the friendly flora is now center stage, and it’s mostly not found in pizza.
Our pizza parlor neighbor to the south feels a bit like a wormhole to New York. It has a few contiguous booths girding a corner and room for two standing customers, along with picnic tables in the parking lot. You have a selection of pepperonis and can add broccoli to your pizza (which according to my life mate is ferboten). The salad also has pepperoni, a multitude of veggies, and a nice dressing. Not as great as my dressing recipe, but at least four stars.
The order takes 40 minutes on a Friday, and we walk over 30 minutes after placing it. This week the clown car opened and there were ten of us standing in line at once, participating in the same acrobatics that happen on a full flight when the seatbelt sign turns off and advanced turbulence is expected. Without eye contact, we seem to know the steps of the bob-and-weave, the xl pizza box limbo, the awkward square dance of post pandemic proximity.
We could have been fish snaking through stinging waves of coral, and this more than most things is what anchors me to the intense faith that we humans, even those of us with Friday Pizza Night rituals, are all somehow connected.
We are nature. Natural. Bags of slightly briny water, separated by paper thin membranes and prayer.
Back home I plated the pizza and he the salad, taking care to sort the raw onion and mushrooms out of my bowl. I can eat them, I just prefer not to, and in my home at the end of a week where I learned troubling things that can befall humans and land us in urgent need of medical care due to our fragile mortality and narrow salt margins, I will stick to my preferences.
We eat in front of the television when the weather doesn’t permit terrace dining, and Dexter is a safe and known companion, educating us to a time before Obama was a household name, and warning us never to set foot in Florida. It’s that or medical dramas, and sometimes serial killers who prefer victims who share little with you feels a bit more gentle.
I’m quite European with my salad eating, due in part to my appreciation of hot food being hot, so I had consumed the coated bits of my pizza and reserved the crusts for dressing swabing.
I got to a sizable bit of red cabbage - smooth and rounded, and nearly the size of a hockey puck. It stared at me and sang the song of fiber, and cruciferous vegetables. It’s not my favorite, but it passes some muster and meets the above listed parameters. Without a knife at the coffee table, I decided I’d just get it down in three bites, envisioning the rapture of the beasties in my belly, and how many unredeemable points I would receive for my efforts.
It was so challenging. So sharp. So spicy. Familiar and foreign and a bit out of place. I alternated bites of crust, and swallowed the first two thirds with the salve of my health benefits. As I started to swallow the third bite, a notion sprang forth.
This is harsh and spicy.
This is what an onion tastes like.
This is an onion.
More mortifying than the disdain I have for uncooked onion was how long it took me to realize that I was tolerating something very, very unpleasant, whose name I know and whose number I have.
“I’ve just eaten an onion,” I said with a stunned flatness that my person interpreted as accusational.
“Sorry, I thought it got it all,” he replied.
Both of us, taken by this wolf in sheep’s clothing.
It is a sign of the times, I’m afraid, which I attribute to my fortitude against the tide of epoxide rings in Ochem II, whose very nature haunts my dreams, and the fact that our unprecedented times have really muted our tastebuds for reason and decorum.
Anyway, that’s what I’ve got for you. And a dressing recipe that is a five star favorite of everyone except my mother.
Thanks for reading,
K
