For the next one, you don't have to think of anything.
You don't have to imagine smokers and airplanes--
such an odd idea.
It's 20 years ago--
I think back that could have happened.
This one is called "Meditations on Starch."
"Potatoes-- Mr. Spud opened at the local mall
and hired my high school boy for his first job.
He was saving for a trip to Europe, where he has relatives.
He's been taught to do amazing things with potatoes.
They're just a shell of their former selves.
No longer prize for snowy yields,
for understated contributions to stews,
now, they're just parka-like pockets waiting to be stuffed.
It's the fate of blandness in the mall-managed world,
I tell him, to be upscaled into glamour,
like pita bread and bagels, chicken and veal,
stuffed with yogurt, sour cream and cottage cheese,
spread with peppers, cheese and broccoli,
topped with Thousand Island dressing and bacon bits.
What wizard thought this up?
Mother, I still like mashed potatoes,
even the name is honest and reassuring,
after the geposhtket concoctions with alfalfa sprouts
and garbanzo beans--
butter-topped, cream-colored bins of heroic self-indulgence
inviting a finger-dip the way a full can of white enamel
compels a brush.
Is there a taste explosion in the world finer
than the first lick of the Dairy Queen cone--
the roughened vanilla from a freshly opened tub,
the drowning in concentrated carbohydrate
where fats and starches come together in snowy concupiscene.
Corn-- my son never knew his grandmother,
whose presence comes back to me as I stand at the Mr. Spud
toppings bar.
She only exists in these sharpened moments,
triggered by significant images that otherwise baffle me.
Mother, I murmur, what do you make of this?
Questions to my mother or questions to history.
Answers from her are brief parables of the 20th century.
Don't you know, she tells me, the yearning for a clean, quick
anonymous bite is universal.
My mother found herself in Prague in 1933.
Her art school in Germany had just been closed.
One of her professors offered escape with him to Rio.
Many were in Paris.
Many went to Paris and Brussels.
These weren't the big-time Bauhausers--
New York and LA weren't in the cards.
These were commercial designers, but not designing enough,
my mother would joke.
Shanghai, Istanbul, Alexandria, Stockholm, with the leaders
taking off for Caracas and Rio.
One got to Veracruz.
Maybe eventually, some of them made their way to America.
My mother gone to Montreal.
I was a stamp collector.
I knew the tales behind those thick letters
with the high denomination stamps,
the elegant handwriting, and black ink turning to olive.
Canceled stamps are less valuable than mint,
but I treasured them for the urgency of their cancelation.
My mother had known a time when the germ of genius
was clustered in the back streets of Dresden, and Weimar,
and Dessau, before the Big Bang flung into tin shacks
on the shores of Maracaibo.
The poles of her existence can move me
to tears, the B. Traven world of artists
from the heartland of order and austerity, rotting
in the rat-infested tropics.
She showed me photos of an art college,
hand-painted signs on a tin roof shack,
Herr Professor in jodhpurs and a bush shirt,
teaching from a canvas deck chair.
Poor old, Dieter, she'd say.
She'd wanted a career in fashion design.
Her surviving portfolios from an art school
feature ice skaters and ballerinas.
She was the Degas of Dresden, but the faces
of her skaters and dancers seemed grafted on,
dark and heavy like hers.
The eyes are shadowed in the movie fashion of the day.
They stopped just short of grotesquerie,
for those girls will never soar, never leap.
She could get the bodies, but not the faces.
I can't tell if it's expressionism, autobiography,
or mild incompetence.
I don't know if those were the drawings she kept out
of fondness, or the ones that didn't sell.
Others found their way into magazines.
The idea of my mother influencing the Prague spring
collection of 1934 fills me with wonder.
Or do I read too much into those drawings,
too much into everything about her?
Had she somehow secretly read Kafka?
The idea of her Europe, of pre-war Central Europe,
tugs at me.
The continent I missed by the barest of margins.
There was no concept of Eastern or Western Europe
in those days.
Warsaw and Prague were as western as Paris.
Russia and Spain, of course, didn't count.
They were Asian or African.
Budapest and Bucharest had reputations
for pervasive dishonesty, deriving perhaps
from the perversity of their languages.
So the stories I grew up with and passed on to my son
were of an idea of Europe that hasn't existed in 80 years--
a Holy Roman Empire, in which a single language
and a single passport dominated all others,
and the rest of the world suffered paroxysms of exclusion
for not being European and specifically, German.
When he was 12, I asked my boy what he
wanted to be when he grew up--
a European, he answered.
In Prague, she got a job painting commercial signboards
to hang over doorways, like British pub placards.
One of the first signs she painted
was for something called "Indian Corn"--
a corn cafe, nothing but stubby ears of corn,
cut in half, standing in pools of butter in Prague in 1933.
She had never eaten corn.
Her parents considered it servants' food,
part of a cuisine beneath serious cultivation.
Nothing that required labor in the eating, and corn on the cob
looked like work.
It was part of their diet.
My grandparents, whom I of course never met,
favored pre-Nouvelle cuisine French cooking, which
meant soft, smothered, simmering things-- the mashed potatoes
of their day, short on fiber, low on spices, long on labor,
and quickly digested.
Much favored were compotes and warm puddings,
since they detested anything cold, as well as anything hot.
Worst of all were the still-churning molten messes
that had become chic in Germany with the rise of Mussolini,
upscaling the lowly pasta.
My grandfather's response to history
is summarized in a single gastronomic grumble--
why couldn't Il Duce have been a Frenchman?
At least, we would have eaten properly.
My grandmother, no less patrician,
responded, be grateful, he could have been Hungarian.
Of all the stories I want to know,
of all the things my mother told me
of the secret lives of complicated people,
I remember only these ridiculous little lines.
She paints, so she painted her cob--
half a cob, and the cobs weren't big in those days--
standing up like a stubby candle in its pool of butter.
Each kernel was treated like a window in an apartment tower,
radiating a buttery light.
It wasn't easy before acrylics, before the conventions
of magic realism, being a German artist
to devote herself to a humble corn cob.
I didn't know anything at first or maybe
I discovered it as I worked.
It was love for America, that's how she put.
It a craving for Indian corn saved my life.
Franz Kafka had been living a few blocks away just
a decade earlier.
He'd written Amerika under the same mysterious craving,
though it didn't save his life.
Maybe America worship was in the air,
at least among those who professed
no longing for Germany.
For my mother, Prague was just another provincial German city,
with an interesting Slavic component
to be respected, but faintly pitied.
She couldn't imagine civilized discourse
in any language but German, with the possible exception
of French in well-defined circumstances.
French and German divided the dignified world between them,
the spheres of pleasure and labor,
though her French years were still in the future.
Her boss had a son named Jurgen Jaeger--
a good movie name, and he had dabbled in films
like many Germans in the '20s.
He still thought of himself as a set designer, a property man,
but not a man of property, he joked.
And the joke has survived them all
because my mother jotted it down.
He also identified strongly with Hitler's Sudeten policy,
feeling himself mightily abused by the majority Czechs,
with their dirty mongrel ways.
I'm making him sound unappealing, a Hitler of sorts,
another expansion, a sign painter with acting ambitions,
born on the rim of Germany, but my mother never did.
His attitudes were too common to be evil.
I'm sure most Prague-born German speakers yearned for ennosis
with the Fatherland, all other implications of Hitler-rule
to be put aside temporarily.
This, then, was my mother's situation in 1933--
she was 30, and unmarried, talented, attractive,
and stateless.
She had an admirer whose rechannelled ambition
was to join the political and, if necessary,
military services of the greater German Reich.
I have seen his picture, the suggestive swagger,
as I interpret it, of one leg up on the running board,
elbows on the windshield, body tight against the touring car's
flank.
No monocle, no dueling scars, but a leather coat,
a self-regarding little blond mustache,
and a short, elegant cigarette that
can only be carried in a theatrical gold case.
He strikes the pose of a big-game hunter,
even on the Carpathian picnic in the summer of 1934.
This is the man who must be eliminated
before I can be born."