A writer's life, a chef's life, part 2

straddling two centuries at the University of Kansas

(This is the second part of my miniature autobiography. The first is here.)

Childhood is a time of Legend. Every teenager solves the sphinx's riddles, each child is the crawfish that dives to the bottom of the waters and returns with the mud that becomes a continent. But once the stories reach an end, when the fire goes out and the conch falls to the sand, the ancient, eternal child becomes a shell, a husk, a shed skin. An adult emerges, naked, bewildered, and alone, stepping into History. The history I stepped into spanned the death of one century and the birth of the another, the start of a period of endless war and an ever-growing police state. Arriving with a head full of Karamazov and naive visions of a cozy office crowded with books, enchanted sweater vests, modest renown, security, and tenure, this country boy had to hit the ground running.

My abrupt and frankly unwelcome entrance into History is tethered to Lawrence, Kansas, the university on the hill that resides there, the cobblestone streets, Massachusetts Avenue and its bookstores, restaurants, bars, shops, and theaters, the stately trees lining quiet residential streets, and the limestone architecture embedded with all manner of fossilized wee and cavorting beasties from the days of the inland sea, but more than any other place, any bright hub of culture or stately hall of learning, my college years are tied to Professor Maia Kipp's (Masha's) modest kitchen table and the delicious hours lost there in discussions of Nabokov, Bely, Akhmatova, and Pasternak over bowls of borscht with smetana, thick slices of Wheatfields sourdough bread, and cups of strong loose leaf tea. Often these suppers would be the first and only meal I'd have that day. I was always hungry then, but my youth protected me from the pain of it.

Masha is Russian-Jewish émigré and a member of the intelligensia, which, she assured me, is a nearly extinct class in Russia and entirely unknown in the United States, but the one to which I spiritually belong. Her and her husband, the Russian historian Jacob Kipp, a brilliant, gregarious man with windowpane-rattling laugh, all but adopted me. The nourishment they gave for the soul, mind, and body sustains and strengthens me still. My life outside of their kitchen, however, was a morass, my progress forever hindered and imperiled by accident, impediment, character, and fate. By the end of my first year I was homeless, frying donuts for minimum wage from 3AM to noon, and cut off from financial aid for sins of intellectual turpitude. Always either in or on the cusp of economic ruin, my tuburcular '86 Ford Escort in perpetual collapse, I also worked the graveyard shift at a gas station where I traded hot dogs and coffee for chess lessons with a homeless savant named Bob, helped organized anti-war protests and environmental campaigns, was nearly tear-gassed in St. Louis, and of course endured standard heartbreak and romantic misadventures endemic to young adulthood. Eventually I found stable and tolerable employment at Copy Co, an independent shop run by an Iranian family that covered the windows with a nervous armor of American flags after 9/11 and never took them down. After a disastrous first year, imperious as a dauphin, I refused to take required classes like English 101 or Geometry, enlisting instead solely in graduate level courses in literature, history, religious studies, and art history with the most interesting professors I could find. When I found a professor that moved and challenged me, I would simply keep taking their classes, regardless of the subject matter. Many of these professors took a kind interest in me, attempting to either persuade me to take the courses I needed to graduate, or to convince the administrators to allow me to test out of the classes I refused to take, but they never made any headway on either score.

I wrote mostly in secret. I had no concept of publishing and even less of an understanding of the literary community. Some dark instinct kept me entirely away from the creative writing and journalism programs. I only wanted to study at the feet of the masters, to somehow learn masonry by praying in cathedrals, to be a natural. Aside from Masha and a few trusted friends, I showed no one my work. I realize, in hindsight, that much of my early writing could have found its way into print. There was nothing really preventing me from having an enviable career, a collection of poetry and two novels out before I was thirty, apart from my profound ignorance of the world and my terror of joining it.

Becoming a chef? I never thought of it. I certainly ate adventurously. Masha's Russian cooking, the many and diverse cuisines offered by the Lawrence restaurants, Lebanese red lentil soup, toro nigiri, green onion pancakes, pupusas, chili verde, cheddar ale soup, lamb rogan josh, the wonderful gustatory treats and heady libations experienced during a short trip to Munich and Prague, all educated my palate and strengthened the sensual substructure that cleaves me to this life more than anything else, but I never got out of bed in time to go to the Farmers' Market, not even once, and my roommates complained every time I put onions in a pan. Once, I made Ash-e Anar, a Persian pomegranate soup, for Masha and Jake only for honest Jake to compare it, ruefully, accurately, devastatingly, to dishwater.

Five years after I dropped out of high school, I dropped out of college, making the last institution to graduate me the Southeast of Saline Middle School. By then, I was engaged to my Russian tutor, Olga, and together we moved to Berkeley, California, where she would pursue her PhD in Bio-Chemistry. I planned to find a part-time job and begin my literary career, and unlike all my college plans, that actually sorta happened.

*

These autobiographical moments will appear irregularly. There are simply too many more topical subjects to address to spend every week naval-gazing. Also, I find writing about my past uniquely taxing.

Later this week, paid subscribers will get a recreation of old Lawrence legend Jerusalem Cafe's Red Lentil Soup. This heavenly dish was served as a humble part of their lunch special, but it remains, along with the cardamom in their Turkish coffee, one of the pillars of my personal flavor profile. Many of the most satisfying moments of my time at university were spent over those little aromatic yellow bowls, marveling at tight little stanzas of Paul Celan or Ingeborg Bachmann between sips of soup.

Ciao for niao,

William
p.s. That’s me, third from the left, center row.