Or what I learned from pickling: an existential riff. 

Against all odds, I created pickles this year. Two batches, even. What’s next, knitting? The truth of that makes me weep a little.

When I became a vegan, pickles unexpectedly became delicious. Alicia told me they would. I was surprised that this clueless kind woman was so prescient. But she left off speculating on the biology underlying the phenomenon. Why does the absence of dietary animal provoke a taste for pickles? This question keeps gnawing at me because I hope the answer is consequential, somehow. Maybe even medicinal.

But for now, I’ll move back to the topic at hand: pickling. And What I Learned From Pickling.

Here is how this specific summertime pickling episode came to pass. Wandering in the exquisitely flamboyant and colorful Portland farmers market, I saw a big bag of cucumbers labeled “A big bag of cucumbers perfect for pickling.” Just five bucks.

This perfect cucumber bag was off to the side of the market stall attended by a three-person staff, one tattooed, two not, all with suspiciously clean finger nails, selling their wares to urban foodies living in agriculturally-challenged zip codes. The lonely cucumber bag was my Cinderella to the bounty of heirloom tomatoes, bursting marionberries, goat’s milk artisanal cheese. I recognized my underachieving tribe right away. Plus, naked bundled cucumbers are a vegan’s dream.

Admittedly, they were small, a bit shriveled, and I thought of Viagra. The Cowboy does not need Viagra, not yet. My mind is flying today. I consider anew becoming a memoirist, a genre I detest but I’m lately obsessed by. I think this impulse may be similar to what happens to other people lightly approaching middle-age when they become obsessed with genealogy. Memoir is the writer’s excavation of the past, the desire to make the bedrock of life meaningful, even when we know it is not.

“I’m gonna buy this big bag of otherwise inedible vegetables and, yep, I’m gonna create a tiny moment of meaning for me and I will shove into that moment my decades of useless urban life baggage by transforming this bag of limp organic nothingness into delicious pickles that both Oregon foodies and ranchers will tear apart with passion,” I said. “I personally will bridge the urban-rural divide. I’ll do that just before writing my memoir, hell, bridging the divide will become part of my memoir.”

A new goal. Goals are so great. Each one is virginal and envy-free.

“You are not the pickler type,” the Cowboy says.

I fork over five bucks, buy my plein-de-cucumber bag and pull out my phone. Well, guess, what, Cowboy, it turns out, Caesar was the pickler type. Shakespeare too. I’m the Shakespeare type, right?

“What say you? Hence, Horrible villain! or I’ll spurn thine eyes like balls before me; I’ll unhair thy head: Thou shalt be whipp’d with wire and stew’d in brine, smarting in lingering pickle,” I read.

A pickling tragedy. Is there more?

“Caesar fed his troops pickles because it made them brave,” I read on. Brave how? They must have been really bad pickles, I think.

The Cowboy gave me the you-are-still-reasonably-cute-at-your-age-but-increasingly-exasperating look and then said, “I suppose you are in good company, then.”

Pickle haiku. No. Pickled penises. Definitely not. A stratigraphy of pickles? Maybe. Yes. That will work. I share the link to pickle history in columnar form but he’s already gone, sucked off by the Portlandia food cart tribe.

Hmm. Maybe I should establish a food cart dedicated to pickles. Or write a memoir that opens with this moment reflecting on the future creation of pickles and how it symbolizes a revelatory moment regarding a misspent drug-addled overly sexed youth. I’ll create a performance art piece about my transition to veganism and monogamy and druglessness, with pickled underpinnings. Or a rap: Peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. That needs work. I pace over to the next stall. Artisanal hand-dyed wool spun into yarn. Six bucks a bunch.

I take the cue. Three weeks later, I have my pickles. I share them with the Cowboy. They are really tart and we smile eating them. A single moment of meaning. That’s What I Learned From Pickling. Plus how to make them of course.сайт