(Note: This story is true. I tried -- oh how I
tried -- to fictionalize it but, really, the truth is stranger than fiction.
There may be a bit of revisionist history and faulty memory but, that said, it
is essentially a true story.)
The house was a Victorian lady with a tall
imposing tower-- well beyond her prime. Her once lush chocolate brown had faded
to a dun color with an undercurrent of yellow showing through. Her scalloped
shingle decorations were missing pieces like an old mouth devoid of a few key
teeth. The ornate screen doors retained their gingerbread scrolls but the
screen itself was torn and frayed letting into the cramped entry all manner of
flies, bees and hornets that died and littered the corners of the floor with
their fragile carcasses.
She was an odd house for this little southern
Vermont community where most of the dwellings favored a colonial style or
farmhouse motif with screened-in back rooms and rocking chairs on porches, and potted
geraniums emphasizing their whiteness.
Odd as she was, she perfectly suited her
inhabitants. The master of this manor looked for all the world like Danny
DeVito-- short and dark with a monk’s tonsure of hair fringing his shiny bald
pate. He shuffled when he walked but at a pace that belied the concept of
shuffling as he hurried to answer the multi-toned and lengthy gonging of the
door chime. The chime was accompanied by the howling of three tiny dogs that
sounded, as their howls echoed down the halls, as if they were the very Hounds
of Baskerville, deep and belying their smallness. On sunny days, it was a
laughable introduction to the household. On dreary days, it sent shivers up
your spine.
His wife, or companion, was a ramrod-straight,
quiet wraith of a redhead of few words. But who could blame her? The voice of
the lord of the manor rolled from the depths of his diaphragm and filled the
foyer with a mix of welcome and spookiness as the full-size half-nude bronzes populating
the hall looked on. How this strange milieu was created in Vermont is anyone’s
guess. It was rumored that this voice had been a great force in the halcyon
days of radio serials and its owner had been a bit player in movies in the
1940's and '50's. I totally believed it though I had no proof. When I visited the
dwelling there had been no Google to assuage my curiosity. The theatrics of the
house and its inhabitants screamed of Old Hollywood -- another time and another
place.
The atmosphere was one of what I called “moldy
money“ – money so old, and earned so long ago, that its traces lingered like
the scent of something unidentifiable … elusive. And what seemed like a fortune
long ago no longer was -- yet the sense of it remained.
Today the twin forces of faded wealth and fierce
independent living co-mingled in this strange household. The large upstairs
bedrooms were rented out as a kind of quasi-nursing home turned respite-care
safe house for an assortment of people that society forgot. When the meager
income from the moldy money would not pay the taxes, the rooms became
available.
And that was why I was here.
The large front bedroom was sparse and spotless. A
queen-size bed. A dresser. A bedside stand with a Big Ben clock ticking away
the hours. Sheer, white curtains fluttering in the breeze. A large wooden armchair.
Marissa grinned her toothless grin as I entered
the door. Her speech was halting and labored in the twisted convolutions of her
wounded brain. Her hands and knees were stiff as boards and it was my duty as a
visiting occupational therapist to help her exercise and feed herself. Yet we
both knew that little real progress would be made, and that the funds would dry
up when her progress became only maintenance. We both dreaded that day, and
really worked hard at improvement-- like rolling a boulder up a mountain. God
gave Marissa a wonderful gift in the form of the loveliest of singing voices …
pure and sweet and unimpeded by the cerebral palsy that contorted her speaking
voice. It felt like the closest thing to a miracle I had observed in my
therapist’s life. Once I discovered this, singing was a part of our visits: “Swing
Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem” regardless of season.
Another part of my visits was the constant
invitation from the lord of the manor to join him for lunch. It did not seem a
professional thing to do nor did I want to deplete their meager store of
groceries. I declined time after time. But, as I suspected that our visits were
drawing to a close, I wanted to stay, to soak up this odd environment, to enjoy
this eccentric and lonely altruism.
“Come,” he commanded, crooking his finger and
heading down a dim hallway lined with Old Master style paintings, dark and
imposing. “I’ll make you a salad … you’ve never had one like this before.”
And indeed I had not. The kitchen, surprisingly
small and light for the rest of the house, looked sparse and bare. One large
red onion was sprouting in a jelly jar on the sill. Thwack …
The green tip sprouts were amputated from the
bulb of the onion, gone and chopped before I knew it. The tiny, ancient
refrigerator flew open and, like a juggler plying his craft, a jar of this and
a lump of that, a hunk of something and a bit of something else unidentifiable,
polka-dotted the counter.
One last green olive in a bottle was fished out
and chopped, its red pimento heart becoming six tiny pieces, a spoonful of
salty brine extracted before going back in the fridge. A dry lump of cheese no
bigger than a marble was grated down to a fine sharp powder. One of the juggler’s
pieces was a scrap of hard salami diced into the tiniest of miniature pieces.
Now my host coaxed a few hearty chunks from the
root of a celery stalk, wrapped in moist paper and saved for who-knows-how-long
but still useful. One tiny carrot became little golden pennies to add to the
mix.
Smack … the flat of a knife blade squashed a
clove of garlic and a heel of bread became croutons toasted with a few drops of
olive oil from an almost-empty bottle.
All I could think of was the story that has gone
around the world of the beggar denied food but allowed a pot and a spoon and
water to boil, tricking others into contributing a bit of this and a bit of
that to the stone he was boiling for his "stone soup." With all the
contributions the result was the finest of soups … how clever was this beggar
in slaking his hunger!
Magically the old, cut-glass bowl began to fill,
and the garlic perfumed the air and invaded my senses. A single leaf of lettuce,
a scrap of green pepper, one tiny tomato, a radish no bigger than my pinkie
gave up their color and flavor as his knife flew. Yes, my host tricked all the
bits and pieces of leftover and usually thrown out food into a salad the likes
of which … as my host had said … I had never tasted before. It was rich and
complex and delicious and needed not a speck of dressing as the flavors blended
into a sumptuous gustatory delicacy served in small but oh-so-satisfying
portions.
Within a month, my patient visits were terminated
as Marissa was judged to be on a maintenance-only path and no longer eligible
for therapy visits. I missed her joy at seeing me come in the door and I missed
her clear, bell-like voice and the dual miracle of that voice and the magic salad.
Now, I make this salad often in my own home when
I have bits and pieces that do not seem substantial enough to stand on their
own.
And my children have it in their lexicon of
family language: “Rock Salad,” for my
host indeed went by the name of “Rock.” And, in my mind, there’s only the
slightest difference between the man behind the Rock Salad and the one behind
stone soup: both were old tricksters of the highest order, making something
wonderful out of a wholly improbable start.
This lesson will not be forgotten as the taste of
that salad lingers still on my tongue the way the memories of Rock linger in my
mind.
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