Sea Change

Last night on "Fresh Air" Terry Gross interviewed a Lebanese TV anchor named May Chidiac who survived being blown up in her car by Syrian militants, an attack which cost her her left arm and left leg. I was listening in stunned silence as I drove through the streets of the tiny, tiny town, on my way back from a mission to collect the ingredients for my very first spinach mushroom quiche.

I'd left the house in a buoyant mood, having been thoroughly busy and needed and ful of answers all day at work. I'd even spent a long tense moment in the HEB weighing the prospect of making my own crust from scratch or going with the intoxicatingly easy Pillsbury pre-made option (I went for the latter). Out in the parking lot the trees were covered, every inch of every branch, in clouds of chattering grackles, and I remember feeling triumphant that even though my car was smattered in bird shit, I'd made it safely inside without being hit. Then I turned on the radio.

There are some stories that, while I'm hearing or reading them, I get this weird feeling of moving inescapably forward with the momentum of the events, like I've suddenly stepped on an airport moving walkway and no matter what I do, even if I were to stop and stand completely still, I would still be caught and drawn forward in the current.

Last night May Chidiac described the day she went to a Beirut monastery with a friend to pray, and then got into her car to go meet her mother for coffee. The yards that passed by in my headlights, their tall scraggly grass, their Virgin Mary monuments and tilted concrete bird fountains, stood out in stark relief as she described turning around to put her prayer candles onto her back seat and then registering a sudden bright flash. I crept forward through a darkened four-way stop as she described seeing "black snow" falling all around her, and how she realized she was now in back seat with the candles and that she couldn't breathe. She described crawling out of the car and into the street, and then looking back and seeing her left hand resting on the ledge of the driver's side window. The last thing she registered was her own screaming, and how it took a long time for anyone to come and find her since it was the middle of the day, and the equivalent of a Lebanese siesta.

By the time May Chidiac's story ended on a note of dazzling grit and defiance-- she has prosthetics and continues to broadcast her show despite further threats-- I had been parked in front of my house for ten minutes clutching plastic bags of warm milk and wilted spinach. My mouth hung open. My eyes felt glazed. As I struggled out of the car, I heard a tangled melody in the air, tinny-sounding and almost obscured by the wind, and for a heartbeat I almost thought it was one of the prayer calls I'd heard in the evenings in Saudi Arabia, but it was actually an old Hank Williams, Sr. song coming from a handheld radio in the neighbor's garage. The moment was startling, and definitely like coming to the end of the moving walkway and nearly stumbling over your own feet as the world's momentum snaps back into real proportions.

Ever since I read Like Water for Chocolate, I've wondered if it's possible for the cook's emotions and preoccupations to end up influencing the taste of the food. (I especially think about this when I'm pissed off and making dinner for my husband and myself-- "Ta da! Spaghetti with resentment!"). If that notion has any truth to it, then last night's quiche was a world weary one, laden with questions about how the hell a completely destabilized Middle East can possibly untangle itself, and where our own country, its international reputation in tatters, will stumble to next in search of comfort and purpose and the remnants of a vision lost.

I've wondered and worried all day about how the elections will turn out, but even though it's my day off I've been careful to avoid the news. In this town, it's not hard to do. I offered up my complicated quiche at a breeders' brunch-- it turned out surprisingly photogenic, but its flavor was underwhelming and over-complicated by the recipe's curious addition of cream cheese-- and chatted about upcoming military-related festivities. Beneath the surface though, I've been pensive and restless. What's at stake for me has become drastically less abstract in the past two years, and I find myself calling on tenets of nature for hope-- surely there must be a sea change, surely in times of trouble there is a tipping point.