“Good luck with your dad,” he replied, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette.
“It’s fiction.”
“Still,” he raised his eyebrows at me, “good luck with your dad.”
“It’s fiction.” I smiled through gritted teeth. He shrugged.
“We’re doing better now,” I admitted, and walked away. Immediately, I wished I’d made up something to embarrass him instead of acquiescing — told him my dad had died, or left my family when I was young.
The first time someone asked me if my novel, “Talent,” had “screen potential,” I was living in Los Angeles. I thought the question was a quirk of the place—a city where most writers are screenwriters and lots of people are paid to read novels instrumentally, with an eye to adaptation. So I laughed and said something to the effect of “you tell me.” My novel contains footnotes and the rambling notebook entries of a made-up author; it does not contain meet-cute sex or much in the way of nonverbal excitement. How’s that for an elevator pitch?
But the Hollywood lens was not specific to Hollywood.
But the blood in vegetarian burgers is too richly symbolic to be dismissed as a gesture of verisimilitude. Should we take it as a sign of atonement, an acknowledgment that we have repented and been granted forgiveness? Or is it a gothic reminder of our ecological sins—an indelible stain, like the blood Lady Macbeth cannot wash from her hands?
Much more than a fancy way to say “parmesan”, Parmigiano-Reggiano is a cheese that can only be made with extremely precise ingredients, in an extraordinarily particular process, in a 10,000-sq-km geographical area of Italy so carefully defined that you can make Parmigiano on one side of the small city of Bologna but not the other.
The result of all that labour and legality is – as many cooks, nutritionists and Italians alike will tell you – a practically perfect food.
I wound up hiking Mt. Brandon by accident. But it is an accident in the same way a traveler stumbles on ruins he didn’t know he was looking for. On Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula, they say you don’t get lost, you discover. And wherever you go, someone has been there before, walking.
So it was with me. While meandering along Slea Head Drive, stopping to take in the coastal views and ruins, I passed the sign for Mt. Brandon. It was late afternoon, still lots of daylight left. No need to return to Dingle just yet. So I turned around and followed the sign to the foot of the mountain.
All day I saw it looming over the peninsula, snow on its flanks, peak in the clouds, a presence. At the trailhead, the gentle slope looked enticing. I could start walking up the trail right now, I thought, the way people have done for hundreds of years.
My six-year-old said “I don’t know time.” She already knows it’s unknowable. Let it be always a stranger she walks wide around.