I was at the grocery store today. Buying a bottle of wine. It was for some cooking experiment I saw somewhere. Braised, boiled, bone-in, bouillabaisse beef, broth something-or-other. I don’t remember what. Something that I like to concoct to make us all fat or well fed or satisfied and wondering why food doesn’t taste like that in the real world anymore? Whatever. Maybe I’ll make a glacé.
I had just bought two gallons of milk from a local farm stand. It was raw milk, which you can’t buy in Florida because it’s bad or something. It is labeled, “For Pet Consumption Only,” right on the label and everything, just like it should. I have two pets. Two no good for nothing cats that get to drink just as much unpasteurized milk as they like or would if I gave them any. I had to bring them into the farm and show them to them before they would sell me any milk, so I am officially vouched for by my lazy cats.
In Florida you can only buy ultra-pasteurized milk products in the store. That’s milk that has had the shit boiled out of it by the application of much heat and many miles of stainless steel tubes conducting that milk and that heat from that cow through various layers of hot and cold to plastic jug to grocery refrigerator to shopping cart. My grandmother used to boil the milk they got from their three or four milk cows out in the barn. The barn that had the shovel planks behind the cows that were not nailed down and could be pried up by my grandfather so he could hoe the cow shit into the ditch below the lowest stalls below where the cows stood, ate, drank water from a steel bowl, and shat. I can see why they boiled the milk. I use the raw milk I buy today to make cheese, yoghurt, butter, and kefir. And I pasteurize it first. One hundred forty degrees for thirty minutes. Just to make sure. Though I don’t boil the shit out of it. Then I feed it to my cats.
As I stood in line at the Publix near the farm market, I noticed something. In front of me were two women buying their grocery items. They were both wearing hijabs and long, black dresses. Behind me was another one wearing the same. Curious. I brought the grocery divider the women behind me had set down on the conveyor belt close to my wine bottle so she could put all of her grocery items down conveniently. I returned my attention to the counter clerk and the customer in front of me. She continued to be a woman in a black dress and a hijab. She seemed to be fumbling with the dollars and change in her purse.
I looked down. The long black dress could not conceal that the woman in front of me was not slim, nor was she young, though there was a young child rotating around her. Mother? Grandmother? I could not tell. But she was wearing sandals. I could see her toes peeking out from the skirts of her dress. It reminded me of something.
When I was in Israel a long time ago, I went on a camping trip in the Negev desert and the Sinai Peninsula. It was breathtaking. On one occasion the bunch of us in the group walked through a narrow path somewhere, somewhere on our way from here to there. Around a corner was a little, narrow pocket by the pathway carved into the multicolored granite and limestone of the Sinai. A young woman was sitting, quietly and patiently, while our group passed by, just letting us go. She wore a burka but one with an opening for the eyes. They were the eyes of eternity. The eyes of night and day. Black as midnight in the desert but outshining the stars above. Scheherazade had such eyes as she entertained the murderous sultan and bought her own life and brought us a life of stories and wonder. I could have sacrificed myself to those eyes and felt myself fulfilled. Eyes such as those demand worship and respect.
The woman in front of me fumbled with her change. I heard a clink on the ground. Looking down I saw a penny. I bent down to pick it up. Offered it to her. She dropped it into her change purse.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” I returned.
