Meat pies and meaning

Car story, bus story, rutabagas

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
—Marianne Williamson, Return to Love

Beauty shot

Colorado lupines. Photo by Elihu Pearlman, who writes on drmetablog.com under the nom d’Internet of Vivian de St. Vrain.

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Last week, I threw three words together: truth, beauty and shame.

My plan was to shock you. To list two words from the sunny side of human experience and to obliquely crash their pretty party with a word I—we—don’t like to say, much less think about.

And then I dropped the ball, fumbled the pass, missed the putt. I didn’t follow up. I just let the word “shame” hang out there for you to make the connection.

Well, shame on me.

A lonely road

Shame is a tough concept. I know; there was plenty in my growing up. Most of it was generated by me, not by my parents, or mean kids at school. It was my chosen reaction to my perceptions of worth, or not-worth.

I sucked my thumb and wet my bed far past toddlerhood. I bit my nails. And I was ashamed of these things.

I was a sensitive kid. Nobody knew that, least of all me. All the embers were banked in those days. I was like the sea anemone I wrote about, also last week, that tightens inward if you touch just one of its tendrils.

Francie that

I had a cute nickname when I was little, Francie. But even today, this name makes me cringe. Francie was the girl who cut her dolls’ hair, not knowing it wouldn’t grow back; who spilled ice cream on her new dress; who wore a plaid top and striped pants to school on a day when my overworked mother went to work early and I dressed and caught the bus by myself.

I recall quite clearly the first time I read that people love to hear their names.

No! I didn’t love my name. Frances, Fran, Francie, Frannie—back then, in my teens, I didn’t want to be linked with the baggage of any of them.

Time, time, time

Overcoming shame has been a lifelong process. So it is for all of us.

There are things in my past that I rightly am ashamed of. I hurt people, through ignorance and stupid assumptions and misunderstanding. I can’t take back those actions, but maybe I can stop them from scratching at my soul.

Raise your eyes

There is one thing about shame, though.

It is a coward.

If you can bring yourself to raise your eyes from the depths of shame and face its reality squarely, you will see that it is only an insubstantial, craven, chicken-hearted smudge on the window of your soul.

All you need to do is bring out your metaphorical rag, and scrub that little smudge right off.

Then you will be free. Until the next instant, when the worm of shame wriggles back into your soul and the smudge is back.

This is our work: Keep remembering, keep feeling, keep scrubbing.

I can speak only for myself, but for me, it got better over time. It got better.

Noticing

It’s all in the details.

Lamppost in Portland’s Hillsdale neighborhood. Who makes ornate street art like this anynore? Not sure what to make of the 666, or is it 888? Fran Gardner photo

Detail of the floor in my apartment. A fox, waves, maybe fish. Fran Gardner photo

Big synchronicity

My daughter Lyza wanted to buy a new car. She had her eye on a Toyota GR Corolla, a “sport-compact hatchback” with a 300 horsepower turbocharged three-cycle engine, a six-speed manual transmission, and a racing suspension.

This car, a dream to drive, is in demand worldwide. In Australia, Lyza says, there is a four-year waiting list.

It’s made by hand in Toyota’s Motomachi factory, where there are no robots or assembly lines. Production is limited.

Lyza was unable to find this car anywhere, online or off. None of the Toyota dealerships in her part of south-central Vermont would even put her on a waiting list.

Out of state

Then last week, she and her boyfriend had business in New Hampshire, and they dropped in on a Toyota dealership there, just to see if they could get on a waiting list.

The dealership was in line for a Corolla GR that Toyota had reserved for the manager. Just that day, the man had decided he didn’t want the car.

So, Lyza was able to buy it.

Whoa!

What are the chances that she could walk into a dealership in a different state, just on a whim, and there was the car she wanted? That is synchronicity. Or one hell of a coincidence.

The car has one drawback: “unfortunately, it’s white. I don’t like white cars.”

Fran Gardner photo

In neutral

You may have noticed—I have—that most cars are not colorful. Red, green, blue—relatively rare. Look at traffic and notice all the black, white, gray or ivory cars.

My own paranoid delusion is that 9/11 changed people’s perception of security, and that everybody just wants to blend in. I see this in interior design as well, in the colors people paint their houses, even clothing.

But back to cars. White has its advantages: it reflects sunlight, so the interior is cooler, and dirt doesn’t show much.

Lyza notes that having a car in another color could be a maintenance issue, it being hard to match paint if body work is needed.

In 2021, according to Edmunds, 25.6 percent of new cars sold in Oregon were white. Gray: 19.7 percent; black, 17.2 percent; silver, 13.6 percent; and blue 10.2 percent. Excluding blue, the  bland colors represent about 75 percent of Oregon cars.

Waiting for the bus in Barcelona. Fran Gardner photo, 2007

Bus story I

Patience

Actually, this is a bus stop story. As a companion and I waited for the bus, we saw a figure push a loaded shopping cart past us to the corner. Then they* went back and pushed another cart to touch the first one. And then a third cart.

Then the whole process began again. One cart was moved about 20 feet across a street and down the sidewalk, the next cart followed, and then the third.

The process took enormous patience.

This was on the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, just at the Portland city limits. The neighborhood is apartments, strip malls, fast fooderies, parking lots. Upper middle-class houses line the side streets.

Where could they be taking those three shopping carts?

Perhaps this person was homeless, although the material in the carts looked relatively expensive, possibly new. It wasn’t clothing, tents or tarps. We had no idea where the carts were being herded to.

Sometimes, something that isn’t a synchronicity is just a plain mystery.

*I use the pronoun “they” because neither my friend nor I could tell if they was male or female. We smiled at one another and had eye contact, but there were clues. Nor did we expect there to be.

Bus story II

Class act

As my bus barreled down the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, the driver nearly passed up a man who was waiting in a bus shelter. The driver stopped several yards down the road, and the man hustled to the door.

“Sorry,” he told the driver with a grin, as he touched his Hop FastPass to the card reader, “I hadn’t realized they moved the stop.”

He said that without a grain of irony and, still smiling, walked on to his seat.

Bus poem

Like me, my friend Merle Alexander keeps track of writing from decades ago. She wrote these lines in 2005, when she was living in Portland and about to retire from The Oregonian. She now lives in a suburb of Atlanta.

I find this a deeply affecting poem. My friend imagines the inner world of a troubled man encountered in a random situation. The poem plunges deeply into that person's re-imagined world, and brings us into it as well. We remember; we are troubled, too.

The Egyptian 1

It’s dark down
In the tomb,
With menacing shadows
Dancing in meager light 
From smelly torches.

He’s been frightened
For an eternity,
But his fears 
Have surfaced
Today,
On the bus
Heading downtown.

We try not to listen
As he cries out for help . . .
Trapped beneath the weight 
Of the earth
In an ancient pyramid . . .
And still trapped in his mind
Today, 
On the bus 
Heading downtown.

His voice is loud,
forceful
And convincing . . .
And you start to imagine
The devils playing
In his head
As he talks 
To them.
They’re traveling
With him . . .
And us . . .
Today,
On the bus
Heading downtown.

You, too, begin 
To dread
That oppressive heat
That closed-in feeling
That silence
That awful darkness
Way down in that tomb . . .
Today, 
On the bus 
Heading downtown.

Hand pies for all

Pasties (say “past-ies,” not “paste-ies”) are a meal that fits in a hand. They hail from Cornwall, the toe of Southwest England that dips in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, with the English Channel along its south side.

I fell in love with pasties through an article, “Pasties, Regal Fare,” from the June 1975 issue of Woman’s Day magazine. In it, Roland A. Browne waxes poetic about the delicacies.

Roland A. Browne’s original article. The marginalia are my attempt to distill his directions. I filed this recipe in a category called “bundles,” which includes empanadas, won tons, pierogi and other stuffed things.

Layer it on

Pasties are sometimes called hand pies. They’re made on a dinner-plate-sized piece of pastry layered with meat (beef, pork, lamb or a combination), potatoes, onion, butter, and turnip or rutabaga slices.

In his article, Browne says to use “white or yellow” turnips. By yellow turnip, he means rutabaga, a more robust-tasting root, not as easy to eat raw. In England, it’s called a “swede.”

Rutabagas are much maligned, but treated with love, they will repay you.

The seagull connection

Fish guts may be a seagull’s second favorite food, after pasties. Photo by Tolga Ahmetler, Istanbul, for Unsplash

Two seagulls and a pasty figure in a memorable episode in The Salt Path, a walking trip book in which a newly homeless couple treks the 613-mile Southwest Coast Path along the Cornish coastline. I love this book and plan to write more about it later.

The writer, Raynor Winn, and her husband, Moth, stopped in St. Ives* to spend some of their scarce cash on a pasty from a shop that claimed, as did many such establishments, to be the the original, the oldest and the best.

Moth wolfed his half, but Ray was taking time to savor hers.

I held the precious crumbly pastry close to me, wrapped round with its grease-stained paper bag. It really was the best pasty I’d ever eaten. Perfectly soft beef, potatoes and swede and just enough gravy not to run down my hand. I took a second bite, trying to eat slowly and make it last, always with one eye on the seagull [in front of her]. My hands left my mouth, and I heard a rush of air as something scraped across my head from behind, and the pasty was gone.

While she had been eying the seagull in front, its companion had come up from behind. And the pasty was history.

*Yes, St. Ives, the place where a passer-by had seven wives, each wife had seven sacks, each sack had seven cats, and each cat had seven kits: “Kits, cats, sacks, wives, how many were going to St. Ives?” The answer, you may recall, is One. The man, his wife and all the rest were traveling away from St. Ives.

The pasty ritual

I’ve made pasties over the years, using Browne’s article as a guide. He uses pork and beef. Lamb might be good, but I’ve never tried it.

I can’t give you exact proportions, any more than Browne did.

• Pie pastry, not too short. Perhaps 3-to-1 flour to shortening. Most folks these days use butter rather than Crisco. Lard makes the best, flakiest pastry.

• Lean beef, such as sirloin, cut into chunk

• Lean pork, cut into chunks

• Onion, peeled, cut into thin slices

• Rutabaga, peeled, cut into thin slices

• Slices of cold butter

• Fresh thyme or marjoram

Roll out a blob of pastry in a circle, then assemble the ingredients on half. Fold over the other half, seal, and then maneuver the filled pasty so that the seam is on top.

Gently wrestle the filled pasties onto a baking sheet. Bake at 350 F for 30 minutes, then lower the heat to 300 and let them cook slowly for another 2-1/2 hours.

Eat them

• Piping hot.

• Cold, like pizza for breakfast

• Or, from the freezer, thawed and heated

• Browne liked to pour cream into his pasty, an idea of which I approve

Here in PDX

A Portland company, Humble Pie, makes hand pies in dozens of variations, selling them at farmers markets all over town. The owner, Rick Anderson, says his company decided to branch out from the fruit pie business when the manager of the Beaverton farmers market told him there were already enough vendors offering sweets.

Anderson sent me a list of 38 varieties, including Loaded Mac & Cheese, Gyro, Corned Beef, Prosciutto Pizza Bomb, Bento, three types of Kolache (traditional, Chicken Apple and Jalapeño & Cheese), Korean, Jamaican, Reuben, Smoked Salmon & Capers, Lentil & Mushroom, and Calzone Margarita.

I tried the English Pasty, and it was satisfyingly good, stuffed with chunks of beef, potatoes, carrots, onion and rutabaga.

Let’s chat. Or not.

Substack is offering a chat function that is a casual place to exchange comments, ideas and observations. I was all for it until I realized it was supposed to be for paid subscribers onlly.

Uh-oh. I don’t want to go there, at least not yet. I value my writing, and I hope you do, too. It’s free to everyone. Some readers support me [thanks!], but I don’t want to exclude the rest.

So until I figure out how to broaden the access, chat is off the table for now.

So, notes?

I opened another can of Substack soup by initiating “notes.” Frankly, I don’t know whether free subscribers can access them. My weekly deadline looms. I’ll get you an answer next week, if I decide to pursue it at all.

Meanwhile, these "notes' would be longer-form snippets, notes, observations that I could share with you midweek. In between the Saturday night postings, I still have material to spare.

I’ve posted one note about the shoe closet of Jenna Lyons, a NYC fashion maven. It is massive—literally hundreds of shoes, if not pairs of shoes. I wish I could just show you the photo, but The New York Times wouldn’t like that.

Click on “notes” at the top of any of my postings to see what’s new.

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July’s resolution

Yes, it’s “walk every day.” I have a nice piece about walking all ready to go, but this newsletter is already long enough. Blame the recipe.

Anyway, walking is coming your way next week, on July 8. Unless I have a bunch of other stuff I want to write about, right away.

Till then,

Get out there and walk.
Stay authentic, and
Go. Slow. Now.

***Plus, don’t neglect to subscribe (free or paid, I love you regardless)***

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