Shiva in the Kitchen

Shiva Nataraja the cosmic dancer

In Hindu mythology the god Shiva Nataraja is the cosmic dancer who performs his divine dance to destroy a weary universe and make preparations for the process of creation.

Well, it seems that Shiva had a hand in the kitchen today. With the intense heat and humidity of high summer in Japan we don't have much appetite for hot food and are always looking for new ways to prepare cold dishes. We decided to make an old favorite, a spicy cold tomato and cucumber gazpacho soup for dinner and went to the market and bought the necessary ingredients. This recipe requires no cooking and is made entirely in a blender. So we took out the blender and gathered the ingredients including tomato juice.

I unscrewed the tomato juice cap and poured half the required amount to form a liquid base for blending the raw cucumber, tomato, onion, green pepper, celery, etc. When I turned on the blender it started making an uncharacteristic banging sound. I thought that maybe the cucumbers were hard to blend or the base housing the blade wasn't screwed on properly and causing the noise. I stopped the blender and poured the contents into a glass bowl, adjusted and re-screwed the base of the blender. When I continued with the remainder of the ingredients the blender sounded normal.

When the blending was finished we looked for the tomato juice cap, but it was nowhere to be found. Then the possible source of the banging in the blender occurred to me and we checked the soup and found, first of all, small bits of something white floating on the surface, a sampling bitten into revealed that it was hard and gritty, suspiciously like plastic. A ladling soon pulled up a sizable chunk of the cap. Mystery solved, soup destroyed and thrown out.

But Lord Shiva doesn't destroy without creating anew. So, we started thinking (a little desperately) about what was left in the refrigerator. We still had half the tomato juice capped with saran and a rubber band. We had some carrots, onions, green pepper, Spanish olives..... Without measuring we added these ingredients raw bit by bit and sampled the taste as we went. Spicing was added at random and as the spirit moved: some salt, rice wine vinegar, sweet Noilly Prat vermouth, garlic, even some Thai Basil—sampling and tasting as we went. Then we covered the glass baking dish and chilled the soup. We ended up with a Carrot Gazpacho with a hint of anise imparted by the Thai Basil. Should be delicious after a good stiff Martini!

If you'd like to try it just get creative and add stuff as the spirit moves you. You might be surprised!

Paraphrasing an old saw, Shiva doesn't close a window, but he opens a door. Now we have a new addition to our cold summer dishes repertoire.  

Thoughts on Summer in America 2012

Rockport, MA

Referring to my recent 3-week visit to the States in a recent email, a friend of mine asked: “Now that you’ve had time to reflect, what are your impressions after being away for so long?” I chuckled a bit at the “away for so long”. It sounded like a had slept away the last 30 years whereas, in fact, I had visited the States just last summer.

But it is a legitimate question, one that I have been turning over in my own mind and one that I have been hesitant to write about. My overall impression is one of--it is difficult to choose the appropriate words--unease, uncertainty, anxiety, a certain weariness and loss of optimism, some sadness, yet, openhearted hospitality, friendliness--and even lack of same, openness, people doing the best they can in trying socioeconomic and personal circumstances.

My friend's email included an anecdote that seems to corroborate media discussions and statistics on the economic scene, the loss of good paying jobs, high unemployment, the relative decline in the value of higher education:

“For some of us nothing much has changed. For many others, life is much different. I’m on a search committee at work for a simple clerk position for our office….231 applicants passed the Human Resources Dept screening for us to review and most of them have BA’s and even advanced graduate degrees. Also, too many have been out of work for 1-2 yrs. Yet, w/advances in automation I just don’t see many past jobs coming back. I fear we’ll have decades of stagflation just as I understand Japan has been having. How have people there adjusted?”

How are the Americans adjusting? That appears to be the implied question. There is is an uneasy feeling that America is going to repeat the Japanese experience of the last two plus decades. It is already five years since the first rumblings of the current global economic downturn. For me it was somewhat like remembering where you were when you first heard of the JFK assassination. In the case of the bursting of the credit bubble I was in a coffee shop in Vienna and happened to pick up an English language newspaper after my usual vacation moratorium on “news”. After five years, despite the self-serving federal government hoopla about how we are making progress but still have a long way to go, I would put more emphasis on the “long way to go”.

early morning shoppers at Walmart

I was taking an early morning walk and having a cup of coffee and muffin at a Walmart near my brother's home and got into a conversation with one of the workers there. She asked me if I was from "around here" and I responded that no, I was just visiting for a couple weeks. I told her that I was from "here" but now lived in Japan. She thought that I was "lucky" to be able to travel and I asked her about her job and she told me that it was "alright" but that she hoped to get training for a better paying job in another industry. That seemed to be a pretty common refrain--looking for better paying jobs that are harder and harder to find. 

flag in front of home
a fairly common sight

In terms of the current presidential election I'm picking up a lot of wishful thinking and nostalgia from white America suggesting that things were better when “minorities” were safely “in their place” and not an issue in elections. I see a lot of American flags flying on Main Street in higher income, mostly white, towns and in the yards of many people's homes. I had an interesting discussion about how “this country in going to hell” in the backyard patio/pool of one of these be-flagged homes. They acknowledged that “we've got our nose in everybody's business”, i.e., the energy wars in the Middle East and the 800+ military bases the US maintains around the world. Yet, they couldn't see the correlation between “going to hell” and “our nose in everybody's business.” It was hot and not very windy and the flag was rather flaccid that day.

Little League baseball

Little League baseball has an unpleasant go-for-the-throat edge to it. It is highly organized and well coached, but, among the “soccer moms” (baseball moms?) it is a deadly serious business. When I was a kid, back in the antediluvian, we used to pick up sandlot games to while away a summer afternoon and have some fun. This modern Little League baseball seems to be a rehearsal for the major leagues and baseball-star-level incomes. One “baseball mom” stands out vividly in my memory. Her son was pitching (the star pitcher it seemed) and she was standing just behind me issuing instructions on how to breath and how to pitch in a very loud voice (and in my ear) to her hapless son trying his best to pitch a decent game. I doubt this lady realized it, but she she was probably embarrassing her son more than encouraging him.

my compact rental car

Ultimately, you can't really nail down the American experience anymore than you can say such and such and so and so about any place on the planet. If anything characterizes America, though, it is its total reliance on the automobile. The price of gasoline is an emotional issue there. Shortly before I arrived in my hometown in a rental car the price of a gallon of regular unleaded was (I was told) around $3.39. When I returned the car three weeks later it was up to $3.65. That's a significant increase when you're filling a 15-gallon or more tank. Here in Japan, the price of gasoline is much higher (the equivalent of $5.60 per gallon), but we don't rely entirely on cars since the public transportation system is excellent and, besides, we have smaller more fuel efficient cars.

in Lenox, MA for Shakespeare's
The Tempest and King Lear

Still, I am quite “American” in that I enjoy driving when in the States. I dislike the Interstate highways because they are boring, sleep inducing and dangerous, constantly battling high speed semis on their interstate commerce business. But I love driving on the smaller back roads through rural towns, smaller cities and the countryside. That is most relaxing, unless you get a bout of diarrhea, and start squirming looking for a restaurant to stop at and use the rest room before it's too late....

jazz quintet in Rockport, MA

home away from home -
note the dog

An old college friend and I got together for a jazz concert in Rockport and Shakespeare in Lenox--both in Massachusetts, and both requiring long distance driving. My friend rented a small cabin in a campground where I stayed after the jazz concert. “Camping” isn't exactly the right word. The campground was nice enough but most of the “campers” had, snail-like, brought their homes with them in the shape of recreational vehicles that could be extended on the sides and looked just like homes in a woodsy trailer park. I can only imagine the cost of the gasoline required to maintain this life style. Anyway, we saw some cute chipmunks around the picnic table that took a liking to pretzels.

"short tail" the chipmunk

My three weeks came to its inevitable end. I had an early flight scheduled out of Logan Airport so I drove to Boston, returned the rental car and stayed in a hotel the night before my departure. My return flight to Japan turned out to be one of those that you hope won't happen, but did. I blogged about it in an earlier post.

Are We Communicating yet?

Teaching is a theatrical art. It mesmerizes, controls and manipulates the audience. Teaching is an authoritarian dictatorship. It issues commands and expects to be obeyed. Teaching is clinical psychology. It listens to the feedback and reads between the lines.

my beautiful 96-yr-old Mom

Soon after I returned from a summer trip to visit family and friends back in the USA, I was scheduled to teach some 4-hour summer classes at the language school I began working part time for after I retired last March. I had been working three evenings a week for two hours and found that to be comfortable. The director of the school asked me if I would teach a week of summer school classes after my return from the States. Without thinking too much about it, I agreed. But, as the time drew nearer I started having second thoughts about doing such long hours for five consecutive days in the full heat and humidity of the Japanese summer. So, I was delighted when I got a telephone call (while I was soaking in the bath) from the director informing me that I would only be needed for two days.

brownie batter and mugs to pour it in

Where my classes are concerned I'm something of a control freak. I like to be fully prepared for any eventuality. Unfortunately, the summer school planning and schedule was outside of my control and I hadn't the slightest idea of what I was expected to do—a situation which, for me, is unendurable. I did, finally, get a sketchy idea of what the day consisted of and prepared as best I could with a few tried and tested techniques in my shoulder bag to supplement the material that was to be used for the theme of my first day—Ecology and Rainforests. That seemed a rather broad topic to me and included making brownies (cacao grows in tropical climes) in a microwave oven. You only need to imagine 10 kids involved in the process of mixing batter, putting it into mugs and inserting one at a time for 1 1/2  minutes—time consuming, milling around with a range of impatience waiting to microwave the brownies. Finally decided to speed things up a bit with two mugs for 2 minutes at a go. Eventually all the brownies got “baked” and eaten with spoons. Amen!

young artist in the raw

After lunch I decided to have the kids draw a “rainforest” animal in keeping with the ecology theme. This is a technique I developed as an Art teacher during my previous employment. Many kids often complain “but I can't draw” in elementary school Art classes. Consequently, I developed a technique to teach simple structural drawing using basic lines and shapes. It proved to be quite popular with the kids and got some good results and boosted confidence. In this technique I draw on the whiteboard while issuing drawing instructions and the kids draw on drawing paper. For this class, I chose to draw a monkey swinging on a vine with the summer school kids.

The next day's theme was Communication and introduced the concept of secret codes. This sounded like a workable topic that kids would like. The class was smaller this time, only five kids, all of whom I had had the previous day. But, all three of the boys were ones I had been warned about as being behavior problems, one of whom, the youngest, I already knew since he is in one of my regular evening classes. The previous day, after four grueling hours with his limited self control, he had pretty much lost it and erupted in a prolonged crying jag. He seemed in better control this morning. The two older boys had caused no disruptions the previous day, although I had never had them in my classes.

after we "communicated"

The second day, however, they decided to “test” the new teacher and started right in pretending not to understand and making intentionally wrong responses—all pretty obvious techniques designed to get the teacher's goat. I obliged with one of my best acts—controlled fury. Works like a charm, catches them totally off guard. I banged the table melodramatically, ordered them with scowling looks and loud voice to stand up and get out and wait for me outside the classroom. Amid looks of shock and dismay and “what-did-I-do?” they marched outside. I let them stew for a few minutes, then walked out, slammed the door, and, aiming my remarks directly at the boys, gave them an ultimatum: cut the crap or go to the office and explain why I threw you out—and no nonsense for the rest of the day. Decide, now! Best disciplinary technique I know—do the unexpected—works like a charm.

I decided to make a “teaching moment” of the incident. Talked about communication and the different ways people communicate through not only words, but gesture (bang the table), facial expression (scowl), tone and stress of voice (shout). The kids, subdued, readily agreed that I had communicated my anger very effectively and were a delight for the rest of the day.

Would I do summer school again? Ask me again next year.