Sour Diesel

Greta, your Food Sucks

I am trying to write, it is days later and I am  making our Sunday gumbo and weaving the sweet peas onto their supports and harvesting  Meyer lemons, pressing out the Skullcap, Mellisa, Vervain, Passion Flower, Kava- name your nervine.  Phone is ringing again, it is Tess, who I  gather seaweed with two days out of the week. I tell her I am busy, she is asking about all this, and is not comprehending, I read to her some of what I wrote on, “Loose the Passport”. She said it was, “too much,” But Greta out at Zuza’s, the  Hunting Lodge where AL Capone had his hide out,  she loves it. But then again she is a woman of tragedy and loss. Rumors follower her and she is dying of all the cancers that you have ever been afraid of. Afraid to even speak of. They keep telling her she will die soon. My knee doctor loves it too, is dying also of cancer as well. Greta does not think it is all, “too much,” Like I said, she is a woman who people whisper about and are afraid if she catches them at it she will wink or spit at them or reveal something they thought hidden about themselves  right there  at the open market. So they try to be quite, and speak of her  in hushed, heated whispers, “…  race cars, charred meat, incest…. olives groves.. torn the kitchen apart with a hatchet…days and days she lives on only sea breeze and Cabernet.” We are all still laughing  when we remember how that great big man from the great big city left a great big critique for Greta. “Greta, your Food Sucks!!” So lovely. He had called himself a, ”… Connoisseur ”.  She took it to a silk screen shop and we all had pretty black tee-shirts with that big shot’s signature on our chest, wore it while we turned over the pork chops in the fireplace, poking them with that prong. Too much? I don’t think so, in light of everyone dying.