The Recipe for Stuffed Salad

I have been in Provincetown for almost six weeks now and instead of the head of the book I came here to write crowning, it seems to be in full embryo mode, and I feel roughly three months pregnant. The baby’s not showing yet, but I’m eating like a Hoover.

I want the book to come out so I can see it, so I can write it, so I can go back to California and take off the hat and gloves the cold is forcing me to buy.

I hate those cumbersome things.

These days it starts to get dark, it seems, while I am taking Bird past the cemetery for his morning walk. The sun is somehow rising and setting at the same time.

It’s making the day into one long meal time. I think of the day’s food intake like this: breakfastlunchdinner. I take a deep breath between each one sometimes, but mostly I spend the darkening day eating.

I am exaggerating, but this story amuses me. It’s 1:45 PM, and already the sky is grey and I’m thinking about putting on my pajamas, so I’ll take my amusement where I can find it.

I don’t enjoy preparing food other than my current staples: grilled cheese sandwiches, roasted Brussel sprouts, and microwaved bows of oatmeal to which I go to the trouble of adding a scoop of protein powder.

I rely on Stuffed Salad to provide me with…whatever green leaves give me. To prepare Stuffed Salad I go to the vegetable area in grocery store and find, here in Provincetown, the organic section which is the size of a coffee table table. I pick out one of the large square plastic containers of mixed greens: last time it was spinach and baby greens—what they are as grownups the container does not say. This container has roughly ten servings of Stuffed Salad, at least in my kitchen.

To eat Stuffed Salad, you take the plastic container out of the frig, open it, take a handful of leaves, and stuff them in your mouth. Chew, swallow, repeat 3 or 4 times.

When I eat Stuffed Salad, I usually think about Galway Kinnell’s poem, When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone. The 11-part poem concludes:

11

When one has lived a long time alone,

one wants to live again among men and women,

to return to that place where one’s ties with the human

broke, where the disquiet of death and now also

of history glimmers its firelight on faces,

where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gaze

of the great granny, and where lovers speak,

on lips blowsy from kissing, that language

the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak

blether the song that is both earth’s and heaven’s,

until the sun has risen, and they stand

in the light of being made one: kingdom come,

when one has lived a long time alone.

I loved Stuffed Salad. I love being alone in the darkening days.

And I look so forward to the rest.