Grasp

For those who have clinically observed me, my tendency toward self-anger must seem puzzling.  It puzzles me most of all.  But I have this way of getting angry at myself before getting angry at others, particularly many others, that is to say, my life.  I put this down to a childhood need to feel in control.  It is I who have fucked up, not mommy and daddy.  As though getting pissed at them is too scary, too threatening.  So, I have this tendency.  One that I have to watch.  And watch it, I do.

Virtually on her deathbed, Marlou made me promise not to eat dinner out of a saucepan.  This seems a splendid idea, and I do adhere to it, more or less.  It's just that Marlou never quite grasped the graspability of the smallest stainless steel pot in her arsenal.  It's a shallow, one-serving sort of pan.  Actually, it is the approximate depth of a serving bowl.  Its handle is well-balanced.  So it's a grab, heat and eat sort of pot.  Or pan.  And the multipurpose elegance of cooking, serving and eating from a single thermal-handled stainless steel container, call it what you will, is so obviously attractive and staggeringly efficient that for the quadriplegic it is impossible to resist.  

Germans even have a word for this sort of thing, the eintopf.  Okay, the word refers to a one-pot meal, some sort of complete dish cooked in a single vessel, but I maintain the concept applies to Marlou's pan.  It's a one-pan.  And I say this deadpan: I can't avoid it.  I was born to one-pan cooking, and may my deceased love forgive me.

Consider that I not only have this pan at the ready, but a more or less complete dish to heat in it and eat from it.  It's a rich Singapore stew, which makes me both happy and even a little proud to reside where I do on the Pacific rim.  A doggie bag left over from Menlo Park's finest Asian restaurant and ready to be dumped into this attractive little pan.  Heat and serve, a retailing slogan from my youth.

Any practical minded person would note the ludicrousness of my pan shelf.  Actually there are shelves, two of them, and they face the stove, which seems to me rather logical.  The only problem is that they face the stove myopically, staring a little too close at its white enamel side.  There isn't enough room.  The arrangement is not a practical one.  It's even hard to say where the pans are on the shelves.  Unless one is an expert.  

And I am.  I know my pans.  They are divided into two camps.  There are the ones I bought, cheap and serviceable, and the ones Marlou bought, balanced and elegant and stainless steel.  Rather narrows the field, doesn't it?  The pots have one kind of handle or the other.  And the one I am looking for, the Marlou-handled pan, well, it can't be far can it?  I'm certain the pan is lurking under one of my pots.  No, apparently it's over there.  No.  There's only one candidate handle visible, and it's in the far corner, the most distant corner, and the most hard to reach.  Not to worry.  I rise from my wheelchair, bend and grasp.

What happens next is best depicted in the film version of Wizard of Oz.  The bad witch tries to grab the ruby slippers off the witch just crushed by a house, and the corpse legs retract.  They curl up in the most improbable, in fact, unimaginable way.  And yet I was totally convinced as a kid, as I am now.  Material objects do this.  That's why the Marlou-handled pan, nestled comfortably in a spaghetti-straining stainless steel pot, name unknown, purposely eludes my grasp.  I reach for it, knocking it slightly, and the handle turns.  It swivels a comfortable 180 degrees.  It was pointing up, but now it is pointing down.  It is wedged against the wall and between the stove, and is now out of reach.  

Even if I wanted to take the neuromuscular risk involved in bending to grab for the handle...and take the chance of falling and being wedged in the kitchen overnight, or, perhaps, longer...the wheelchair behind me, shelf on one side, stove on the other, wall ahead...I can imagine it all....the maneuver is impossible.  There isn't enough room to bend and grab the pot.

Stupid, I scream at myself.  You are stupid.  I am aware that this is a dangerous moment.  While my inner bad parent erupts, there is a heightened chance of things going awry.  I stare down at the pots and the only other object in view.  There is a serving tray, a wooden one, and next to it is a wooden frame.  Does the frame go with the tray?  I don't know.  It's one of those household objects that just sits there being a household object.  Doubtless Marlou would know what the thing is or was.  All I know is that it is within my line of sight, my frame of reference, and being big, is something I can grab.  

I do.  I grab it and knock the handle up.  The pan, nestling in its smooth, round strainer, swivels up, then down.  I knock it again.  Another rotation.  Again, and this time the strainer topples over on its side, the handle of the pan wedges on the shelf, and life becomes possible.  I grab the pan, put it on the stove and open the Singapore stew.  

Damn.  I had forgotten that this stuff contains crab legs.  The friend I was dining with must have cracked them for me.  Nothing more quadriplegic-unfriendly than crustacean food packaging.  Still, there it is.  I haven't fallen.  I haven't defeated myself.  There is a one-pot meal in its pan.  And it is heating.  Outside the rain is falling, and California isn't going to descend into a dust bowl anytime soon.  Things have turned a corner.  And with a little Tabasco sauce, the world will continue for at least another day.