If you are on a budget and
life gives you lemons, you still have to go buy a pitcher to make
lemonade.
I live in Arizona. In
winter, it is oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruits, pomegranates.
People give them to each other in bags or put them on the curb
outside for others to pick them up.
While taking a walk one
night, with my dear friends, we found one such bag on the curb. They
gave it to me to take home and explained how I can freeze their
juice for future use. A
whole bag of lemons I got. A week later, other friends came over and brought even a bigger bag of lemons from their garden
trees.
It took an hour, maybe
more, to squeeze by hand the juices out of all those lemons, but the
amount of money I saved was worth the effort. Two lemons are one
dollar if you buy it here. Eight lemons are one dollar if you buy
it there... think gas money. I got plenty of lemons for nothing.
Lemons, I had lemons, I
had two huge bags of lemons.
I then put the lemon juice
in empty ice trays and into the freezer, took them out of the ice
trays and into little plastic bags by counts of 5 or 6, and back into
the freezer. Now I have enough lemon juice to make salads all winter
and into spring. And I did. I have one bag left in the freezer now.
Let it stay there. The fat lady has sung.
As if on cue, three days
ago, the man who is renting a room and a bathroom in this apartment and is here only in that capacity, brought me a gift.
Outrageous (that's the brand name) bottles of extra virgin olive
oils, one with garlic, the other with Alsace herbs and a bottle of
balsamic vinegar. A day before, he had told me that he was broke. In a matter of ten months, he lost the two jobs that he had. One because of downsizing, the other because of various physical pains he is experiencing which are not clear to me because he keeps changing the explanation. He is in his early 50s. He is quiet, mostly stays in his room, says "hon" after "thank you" and basically a decent person.
“Everything I have is
yours” he said to me once. “No, it is not!” I retorted. I am
not used to that. It makes me very uncomfortable. So now, with the
gift, he has also bought a huge lettuce, cucumbers (also huge), celery and
tomatoes. There were gifts at Christmas too, through his girlfriend, and flowers and Tupperware replacements on one occasion.
That is very nice. I am
not saying anything. He always contributes, i.e. he buys the same
ingredients I used in the last salad we shared. But what I want you
to notice is the timing. As soon as I decide not to spend so much time in the kitchen preparing food, partly because my kitchen is the hottest place in the apartment specially now that we have 110 degree weather here, and partly to have more time to write. In that respect, I am doing good.
For the longest time I
have wanted to make a totally different salad. Not even Tabbouleh.
One that might not have so much chopping involved, but because of
lack of open communication, or you can't clap with one hand, I had fallen into the vicious cycle of
reproducing the same thing over and over again but each time adding new tastes like dried
mint leaves or sumac or oregano, replacing lemon juice with balsamic
vinegar, adding beans or croutons, red onions instead of green, etc.
Basically the same kind of chop chop though with the help of my
roommate's commendable sense of fair play as far as replacing what one consumes is concerned.
I finally managed to tell
him that I prefer Lebanese cucumbers, the ones
that are called Persian in Arizona and Israeli in Brooklyn. Since no one asked me what I needed to make a different salad, and no one heard my preferences, in desperation, without thinking about boundaries, I
started making two salads with two different kinds of cucumbers.
More work. This is getting nowhere very fast.
They say in order for
anything to change, you have to change first.
The last lettuce is still
unused, so is the cucumber. The celery looked better three days ago,
and the tomatoes have wrinkles on them. I am writing.
Finally, I had a totally
different kind of salad today. Artichoke hearts, avocados and
mushrooms in lieu of hearts of palms. It took five minutes to
prepare and it was so delicious, easy to eat and quite filling.
Gifts do not replace consideration, thoughtfulness and cooperation. Neither do they replace communication. They also are not meant to guarantee friendships. At best, gifts either say "put up with me a little more" or "I am sorry" or "thank you for being who you are."
I suppose it can only take
a salad for change to start occurring.
