Cress-Topped Brown Rice with Steamed and Roasted Vegetables

I invited Tony for lunch today. I hate having to rush preparing lunch and he only has 40 minutes or so. He works nearby but has to rush back. I remember lunchtime when I worked at the clinic. Somehow one never quite gets off the work mode. We gulp down our food, without savoring the subtleties of the cuisine. Cooking for a guest does have the advantage of what architect Renzo Piano called "the pure force of necessity." Cooking for myself is like theorizing, cooking with a guest becomes the "real thing." No longer rehearsing, it's show time!

Indiana has exploded into its summer bounty. The herbs and vegetables on the deck are starting to make their appearance on the table. Before Tony arrived, I snipped some cress and Italian parsley from the deck herb garden and apple mint tips from the downstairs garden. I might buy my produce from Wal-Mart but the addition of freshly cut herbs makes a difference. Maybe it's in the eye of the beholder, the mind of the perceiver, but a trick I've learned through the years from preparing previously cooked food is to add something fresh to it to liven it up again. Food is energy and we partake of the energy even before we start the meal. The anticipation of eating is sometimes as good as the eating itself. The sight and aroma of the food in front of us are already energy transmitted if not to our stomachs, to the mind that is the reason we eat anyway. The body is simply vehicle for the soul, or the animating energy that is our life's source. We can't separate body from mind so maybe the division is foolish. The mind experiences what is outside itself through the body. Experience, of course, is the fundamental operation of energy in us; it is what makes each of us unique.

I heated roast chicken breast from yesterday and put together a mélange that met the challenge of the occasion. My fridge is always full of food, uncooked and cooked. I joke that I have a restaurant's refrigerator. A little of this, a little of that, can make a huge difference in a dish. The blanched snow peas and cauliflower and seasoned them with roast drippings. I pan-roasted slices of tomato and zucchini. I cooked brown rice with kombu knots, serving mounds of the rich, Japanese short-grain rice topped with the kelp and fresh herb cuttings. The result: something to make my mother proud!

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Buddhism in the Philippines, Education Then and Now

I am not Buddhist but Buddhism has impacted me perhaps more than anything else in my life. It's an Asian religion that more than any other factor has affected the greatest area and the most number of people in the region. It's imbedded in many of the dominant cultures of Asia, although not so much in the Philippines where I grew up.

My introduction to Buddhism was hardly momentous. My uncle taught History of the Far East in high school. I remember the room where the class was held but I am not sure what year in high school I was then. Sophomore year maybe? I went to school at the La Paz branch of what was then called Iloilo City Colleges. The school was among the holdings of the wealthy, powerful Lopez family in Iloilo. Both my father and uncle worked for the Lopezes, my father as principal of the main high school downtown and his younger brother as principal of the satellite high school in La Paz, the district of the city where I grew up. In fact, the school was a ten-minute walk from our house on Burgos Street. The campus was pastoral. Set quite far in the back of the property that ran the width of the city block, the school buildings were in a U shape, opening towards Burgos Street. The high school shared the campus with the College of Engineering. In the back, the campus communicated with Jereos Street, the part of that long street that had a reputation for being rough.

Tatay Apin (short for Serafin) taught us the basics of Far Eastern history in the one classroom at the end of the library building, on the right when you faced the school from Burgos Street. I remember the building as unpainted wood with very wide steps leading up from the concrete path that also formed an open U. Most of the building was occupied by the school library ruled over by Miss Palacios. The library was my favorite part of the campus, after the huge acacia tree near the Burgos Street gate in whose branches I and my best friend, Francisco, would unselfconsciously play, oblivious of the other students passing under the tree. The memories are coming back but they'll have to wait for later.

Much of the education I received in the Philippines was a kind of spoon-feeding. I learned by memorizing what the teacher taught as the essential facts of whatever subject we were studying. Buddhism in Far Eastern History was reduced to memorizing the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. I remember my uncle writing these on the blackboard as we copied what he wrote into our notebooks. I don't recall discussing the subject in class and the information barely  seeped into my awareness. Studying was studying to pass the tests and back then multiple-type examinations were becoming popular. They were easier to correct and grade, and I suppose, easier to statistically analyze the results of the students' regurgitation performance. I doubt ICC teachers analyzed the data. 

I was an unusually docile child and teenager. I did as I was told. I don't remember exercising any intellectual curiosity except when I went to the library. The books I chose to read I chose on my own. I wonder today how those choices were made. Neither my parents nor my teachers talked to us to encourage curiosity. The emphasis of both parents and teachers was on making high marks. Maybe I am being unfair, memory being as unreliable as I've grown to see.

In the absence of general initiative and curiosity, I didn't learn much outside the classroom (outside my private reading, which is another matter altogether). As in many other parts of the Philippines, most of the stores downtown were operated by Chinese merchants. Some of these had assimilated themselves into Philippine culture but many, as I found out in more recent trips, maintained their Chinese identity. I could have learned about Buddhism from some of these. Of course, a child would hardly be expected to show that level of interest outside what the adults expected him to learn in school. If I knew then what I know now! If I only took a fraction of the unruly curiosity that I now try to keep under control, I could have learned so much more—about Buddhism, about Chinese culture, about everything! But that was not the case. Like all the people I knew then (and, not surprisingly, most people I know today), we are generally focused on the practical elements—earning a living and raising a family. We are born, we work, we grow old and die.

The Philippines is predominantly Christian and I was raised in that faith tradition. Christian rituals and traditions were the highlight of my growing up years. I lived for the glorious music and pageantry of quaresma (Lent) and of Christmas. That early imprinting retains potency for me even today. On top of this, after high school, I went to two Catholic universities and took theology classes for eight years. Christian doctrine remains at the heart of how I experience life. By my late teens I had started to question the basic teachings of Christianity and for the following two decades I drifted in the waters, not knowing which way was Rome or Jerusalem. Drifting had a great advantage. I began to study other religious systems and philosophies. I began to see religions as mythologies all of them, although adherents of Christianity or Islam or even Buddhism would not, could not see their religion so objectively. Religion for many people is the eyes through which they see the whole, uncomplicated world. For many years I reveled in the variety of religious ideas and practices I was discovering and exploring. Buddhism was the one tradition that penetrated beyond the intellect into a practice. 

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Rosemary Roast Chicken Platter

In November my friend, Kevin, suggested I cut out sugar and salt from my diet to spare my pancreas. I was having my friend, Linda, over for her birthday and decided we would have roast chicken. This recipe was the result. I cleaned and washed the whole chicken, rubbed the inside and outside with lemon and lime slices, crushed garlic,and black pepper (in this order), marinated it for two hours at room temperature in a covered pan just large enough to hold the chicken and the juices, and roasted it at 350°F, 20 minutes for every pound. The chicken roasts more evenly when stuck upright in the broiling pan, using metal supports attached to the grill.
 
Yesterday's roast was the moistest breast of chicken I've had! It goes well with brown rice boiled with dried kelp bundles to tenderize it, and fresh-sliced ripe tomatoes with Dijon mustard and curly parsley were perfect accompaniments.

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Paccheri with Cauliflower and Tomato

Paccheri are two-inch-wide regional Italian pasta. The DeCecco package had a simple recipe for cooking it. I modified the recipe by adding oregano and increased the amount of cauliflower. For a vegetarian main dish, this can't be beat and it is simplicity itself to make. The sauce takes just five ingredients, most of these except for the hot chilli pepper, you already have in your cupboard. Canelloni might be easier found and will substitute nicely.
 
In this platter, I added charcoal-roasted zucchini chunks and lettuce, tomatoes and green onions dry-roasted in a non-stick pan sprayed with extra virgin olive oil.

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The Scent of Green Papaya

Some fifteen years ago I fell in love with a movie, The Scent of Green Papaya (Mùi du du xan), by  Vietnamese-French director, Anh Hung Tran. I saw it at an old neighborhood theatre, the Emerson on East 10th Street. The theater was built as the Eastland Theatre in 1928 in the Art Moderne style and today still sports multicolored tiles on its façade. Now a music concert venue, back then it was showing foreign and art films and a friend and I trekked down to see this wonderful film about the scents, sounds and traditional arts of Asia. 

Much of the movie was filmed in a house that reminded me of houses in my childhood—ground-floor spaces that looked out  on tropical shrubs and trees, the ambient sound of rain, of bullfrogs after the rain, of the gecko's nighttime calls, of buzzing flies in the afternoon and early morning bird calls. Long, narrows corridors led to living spaces graced by tall, big, unscreened windows, tall palms in Chinese pots, and, of course, a piano. The movie was set in Saigon in the 1950s and 1960s, roughly the same period I lived in the Philippines. How far do we travel from our origins only to realize at the end, after the indirection and fumbling, we've recreated the past. Not the past as it was but as it has grown to become, an idealized landscape, a statement of our life's themes.

Some Americans are bicoastal; I am bi-continental. I have feet in Asia and in the West. It's not always been an easy stance. I didn't discover my fondness for the cultures of Southeast Asia until after I had immersed myself in American and European culture. Sprung from a middle-class family (yes, that small percentage of mostly city-dwellers in a largely agrarian society), my world as a child nonetheless felt cramped and limiting. I didn't fit. Life on the farm would have felt even more cramped despite the vast skies and vast spaces. My inner life was dissonant with the life I lived, with the life I saw everyone else live. What flickered on the screen of my mind didn't resemble what they spoke about. Their dreams didn't encompass what inchoate dreams I had. I lived in two streams: the outer where I was fake, acting as others expected me to, and the inner for which then I had no words.

The irony is that now, after living perhaps the major and dominant part of my life, that limiting, limited world of the 1950s and 1960s has expanded into a world of smells, images, and sounds that accompanies me as I drive the concrete streets of America like counterpoint to a melody. Except that now the lost, old world feels more vital and more seductive; it lies like an overlay on what I see today. I still travel in two worlds, a little less clumsily perhaps, juggling the two. Straddling has become second nature.

I had my former neighbor, Linda, and her family over for lunch yesterday. I acquired a Brinkmann charcoal grill two years ago and used it only once. After refraining from eating beef for years I suddenly had a yen for a simple hamburger. In the past I would mix all kinds of other ingredients into the beef. I'd added breadcrumbs, beaten egg, pickle relish, chopped onions, minced garlic, bits of sausage, a hard-boiled egg, even capers and artichoke bits. This time I wanted the beef to star. Ground sirloin makes the best hamburger. It has the right amount of fat and fat is essential to a quickly seared, rare beef patty of a hamburger. I only seasoned the ground beef with freshly ground black pepper but while broiling it sprayed olive oil and drizzled worcestershire sauce on the surface. I also broiled thick Vidalia onion slices and chunks of zucchini, both again sprayed lightly with olive oil. Bobby Flay recommended topping the hamburger with onion and ripe tomato slices, a piece of Romaine lettuce and a horse-radish-mustard dressing.

But I'm diverging from yesterday's most redolent imagery. The sun was shining but the air remained cool through the afternoon. I turned off the air-conditioner, opened the windows, and indoors and outdoors flowed together, just like they used to in my childhood. This is also why I love to walk around the neighborhood for hours. In the car, the passing scene feels like a TV show. Walking, I feel connected to the air outside, to trees and human structures, to bird and squirrel sounds, the breeze, the bite of sunshine, the sweetness of being alive. Straddling is not a problem when you can walk.

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Religious Experience at Quiapo, Manila

The early morning light seems to bring clarity to what we see. This weekend promises to be as perfect an Indiana weekend as one can want. The sky is clear, the air sweet with new-blown roses and bird songs, the air so light it caresses when later it would smear, and the sun still gentle lords it over all.
 
In the light it is easier to be brave and see what the dark harbors. I go back to those dark years in Manila in the late sixties to early seventies. The image of La Solidaridad bookstore still beckons to me from Padre Faura Street, a few corners behind the Hilton Hotel fronting Roxas Boulevard and Manila Bay. I'd take the Ermita jeepney from Plaza Miranda in front of the Quiapo church milling with people at all times of day and night. The plaza was the center of the world to me at the time. There color, movement, sound erupted and swirled like the very heart of being alive.
 
Quiapo Church is formally the San Juan Bautista Church but is better known as the shrine of the Black Nazarene, object of delirious frenzy every 9th of January, perhaps the iconic representation of Manila and the people of the Philippines itself. Chiefly men, but women and children, too, streamed from all over the country to form a sea of brown faces and flickering candles filling every corner of the plaza and the streets through which the statue processes in the same traditional path each year. Men in maroon and orange shirts jostled to take their place and help shoulder the paso or portable altar carrying Nuestro Señor Jesus Nazareno. "Sinisimba ka namin, pinapintuho ka namin, aral mo ang aming buhay and kaligtasan," chants the crowd. We worship you, we praise you, your teachings are our life and salvation.
 
Throughout the Catholic world black statues of saints are held in special veneration by local people. Why this is no one knows despite many learned books proposing all manner of theories. In France and Spain we visited pilgrimage churches of the black madonna. I have experienced something of the power of viewing these images, a phenomenon akin I imagine to darshan (darṡana, Sanskrit)—"seeing and being seen by God." While I no longer subject myself to religious orthodoxy I can't deny religious phenomena. They are incontrovertibly part of human experience. We have few enough moments of transcendence to lift us from the milling crowd to survey "the whole catastrophe" (as Zorba, the Greek calls it). Maybe we don't need too many. We need to walk the earth with solidly connecting steps most of the time but surely there are times too when we need a liftoff from the planet and get a rest from its incessant demands.
 
The statue was brought to the Philippines in 1606 by the first Augustinian Recollect friars who vigorously promoted devotion to the image. The suffering Christ and his mother are dominant themes in both Spanish and Philippine Catholicism. Maybe because life in the still largely agrarian country is barefaced suffering, Filipinos flock to churches on Good Friday to partake in the suffering depicted on the images of Jesus, his mother and followers. Participation is catharsis just as attendance at Greek dramas in ancient times provided a similar communal release for Athenians.
 
I'd get off where jeepney turns from the Luneta into M.H. del Pilar in Ermita. At the corner there of United Nations Avenue was an unpretentious bakery with a screen door that banged behind me if I forgot to grab and guide it gently to the jamb. I tasted my first whole-wheat bread there, an invitation that subsequently lead to my love affair with various breads of the world. I would buy a whole loaf and the baker would slice it on his magical machine to the thickness I wanted. Back at home I would spread a slice with butter. That too was religious experience!

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Landscapes of Earth and Spirit

Santorini on a Cloudy Day

A friend writes about escaping out her bedroom window when she was a little girl to wander the Arizona deserts under the spangled dark sky. Deserts are a powerful symbol for me. There is the story of the Little Prince who befriends a tiny bush with its one rose, an ingenious fox and finally a desert snake that bestows on him death and deliverance. I don't remember how I came by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's little fable but it came when my life was a desert and friendships the only mitigating element in the stark landscape.

I think I bought the brightly colored, thin paperback at the little bookstore, La Solidaridad, on United Nations Avenue in Manila. Like other Filipinos, I studied Philippine History in high school and undergraduate school but I don't think I saw then the bookstore's connection with the newspaper that Filipino expatriates in Barcelona published to attempt to improve the conditions in their home country. One of the contributors was Laong Laan aka Jose Protacio Rizal who seeing their propagandist movement making no headway decided to return to the islands only to meet martyrdom. To the end he believed in a peaceful solution but other Filipino reformers thought otherwise. Historians say Rizal's death, like the murder of the three Filipino priests earlier, led to the Filipinos taking arms to fight for their freedom. It took 350 years to arouse them to a definitive armed conflict. But they did not figure on a bigger country in another hemisphere taking on a weakening Spain to expand her own territories and push the borders of her power beyond her shores. The Philippines became a colony of democracy-touting USA for another fifty years but became one of the first former colonies in Asia to attain their independence from Western powers.

The bookstore was started by writer, F. Sionil Jose, in 1965. I didn't know about Sionil Jose either back then. I didn't know that unlike other Filipino writers who in the upsurge of nationalism were writing in Pilipino he chose to write in his adopted language, English. In the 1960s I was groping in the desert for something though I didn't know what it was I sought. I was naive beyond belief and my mind hopelessly unformed. Yet it knew more than I did. It recognized in that bookstore a kind of intellectual Shangri-la where light rained on the whole undefended landscape breathing life where nothing stirred. I encountered voices there that spoke to me of other ways of being, other ways of thinking and longing. They spoke of worlds larger than the cramped life I saw around me and I yearned for space and light. 

Like F. Sionil Jose, without realizing what I was doing, I was practicing my English. The bookstore was a lifeline that became the rest of my life and English my passport to enter those other worlds. In subsequent years I ignored the culture of my birth while eagerly exploring the new worlds. Now the discrete worlds have merged into a boundless panorama where East and West, European and Asian, are simple counterpoints in the Ode of Joy we are all singing.

But the desert remains, a place of renewal,  a reminder of space and possibilities where periodically I strip myself of accumulated encumbrances to see again what matters.

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