Aharon Levy
The Winter Feast
What winter lacks, as anyone will tell you, is good tomatoes. Also: sunlight, non-eggnog-related cheer, all other pleasing produce. This is maybe unfair to the crucifers, but who’s ever been excited about a cabbage? And, more to the point, felt excited about it again, two days later? Yes, there is citrus, but excepting the occasional fragrant pomelo or impossibly-potent kumquat, there’s something goody-goody about these fruits, a tang of the dutiful as we use them to prevent scurvy or pretend to ward off the common cold.
What winter does have in abundance is sadness, the glum sense of getting by, making do, a Sunday-night feel that lasts for months until it miraculously dissolves in an April sky that’s bright well after it seemingly should be otherwise.
Sadness in winter is like truffle salt on bar snacks: in New York, anyway, inevitable, so any question about its specific appeal is irrelevant. Though hardly anything tangible gets made here any more, the city is still an unending producer of metaphor, memory and existential rhyme, which in winter becomes more obvious as other distractions fade. The sidewalk divots hold water, unevaporated, for days after a storm, reminding me of the leftovers my grandmother Helen brought home when she was still well enough to leave her apartment for a meal on a less than special occasion. She’d exclaim at each hamburger, each bowl of soup or Turkish dumplings set before her, “Oh, have you ever seen such a portion?”, as if her inability to finish stemmed solely from a cook’s miscalculation. And I’d cringe each time, embarrassed by this old lady who couldn’t tell how loud she was, who acted as if she’d never eaten at a restaurant and had no idea what to expect. I’d roll my eyes at waiters and at the meal’s end would just barely stop myself from saying nobody takes home half a burger, a pile of French fries, not to a fridge already full of mummified soups and flat ginger ale.
Things linger in winter; there’s less to hide them, and to haul them off. But maybe that’s not right, one of those declarations that feels profound and so doesn’t have to be examined. The Turkish restaurant we went to is still there; the greasy spoon, the only place I ever saw her eat a burger, is gone, and Helen is gone too. My grandmother, who died in winter, really had nothing to do with rainstorms or sidewalk depressions; the only connection between these things is me, and I’m not sure of my own reliability.
Did she ever see me do this? I was sure not. I was always sure when it came to Helen, confident I saw the whole of things she only grasped in fragments. “It’s on me,” she’d announce at brunch, at dinner, as if any other arrangement had been proposed. It’s only now that I wonder whether this was her way of suggesting that, for once, I could at least offer to pay.
Things linger in winter; there’s less to hide them, and to haul them off. But maybe that’s not right, one of those declarations that feels profound and so doesn’t have to be examined. The Turkish restaurant we went to is still there; the greasy spoon, the only place I ever saw her eat a burger, is gone, and Helen is gone too. My grandmother, who died in winter, really had nothing to do with rainstorms or sidewalk depressions; the only connection between these things is me, and I’m not sure of my own reliability.
Smoke, anyway, does linger in winter air, distinct and sharp as it never is during baked summer. You only occasionally smell the smoke of roasting chestnuts now, but it scatters through my parents’ and grandparents’ city memories, mixed in with Jewish Harlem and skating dates, organ grinders’ monkeys and the idea of Canarsie as the very edge of the planet. I recall eating just a single paper cone of chestnuts when I was a boy; they were tough and grotty, burnt pebbles I could in no way associate with what I’d heard. I did my best, while my father grumbled about how much they’d cost.
I’ve had chestnuts since and I enjoy them but they’re just chestnuts, not memories, not a trip to Central Park or a stupid song I know all the words to. Things will just be things if we let them, but then there’s nothing in them for us. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to find chestnuts now: they’re just an ashy-sweet mouthful, hardly any sustenance at all, and not a candle to a chocolate bar.
Her breath tasted wonderfully fresh even though we’d been drinking the same poor whiskey in the same dirty bar. This seemed like magic to me then, and now seems like gum. I’d met her online, a nice Jewish girl who didn’t love me and I didn’t love, but before whom I nonetheless managed to embarrass myself a few weeks later. I was still figuring things out then, though to say this implies that there came a time when I stopped figuring things out.
You still smell pine everywhere, though, for at least some of winter, when after Thanksgiving unimpressed men from Quebec and Pennsylvania appear with their bound clusters of freshly-cut trees. Years ago, a date and I drunkenly searched for pine nuts among these bundles, though we wouldn’t have recognized any if we found them. We kissed for the first time in this improvised forest, because it was something toward which we’d been advancing all night, and because our rustlings had woken the tree-seller, who turned on the light in his trailer. Kissing was a way to demonstrate our innocence.
Her breath tasted wonderfully fresh even though we’d been drinking the same poor whiskey in the same dirty bar. This seemed like magic to me then, and now seems like gum. I’d met her online, a nice Jewish girl who didn’t love me and I didn’t love, but before whom I nonetheless managed to embarrass myself a few weeks later. I was still figuring things out then, though to say this implies that there came a time when I stopped figuring things out.
Walking now with the nice Jewish girl I do love, with whom I’ve lived for years, I think of the recent discovery, astonishing but intuitive, that we smell not only with our noses but most of our organs. What, I wonder, do the tree-sellers’ insides make of all this, how do their lungs and livers understand the new world they’ve been tossed into, of bus fumes and the steam from artisanal lattes? What is my own body considering, at the familiar annual scent of sap?
In January, of course, the Christmas trees reappear singly, dried but still pungent, to be chipped and otherwise vanished. This hauling away is another winter fragment of emotion, sad because decay is sad, because memory is sad and also harder to ignore when everyone is wearing black and buttoned up as if in practice for a funeral, when we ourselves become only memory.
In January, of course, the Christmas trees reappear singly, dried but still pungent, to be chipped and otherwise vanished. This hauling away is another winter fragment of emotion, sad because decay is sad, because memory is sad and also harder to ignore when everyone is wearing black and buttoned up as if in practice for a funeral, when we ourselves become only memory.
Except maybe that’s bunk, because if things remaining and things departing, things recalled and things forgotten, all lead to the same place, what’s the path? And everything I’ve said might not be accurate, anyway. Usually I remember things one way, but sometimes another, and occasionally not at all. The key difference between the home cook and the professional, any professional will tell you, is not skill but consistency. So what, really, am I cooking here?
It’s easy to put together words if they’re only words, but when they try to encompass even the sidewalk, they falter. There’s enough sadness, though, without adding this failure to the list. And not just sadness; there’s enough of everything, too much. Good tomatoes will return; some things won’t. The city, as much as it wants to think otherwise, is part of the world. And the world, even with parts missing, is more than enough. This is how winter is, because this is how every season is. It cannot be anything other than a feast.
