Pizza Gustav

I feel most like me with a chopping knife in my hand.

I don't know if it is a power/control issue, something to do with latent anger and hostility from my childhood, or just that I like to chop vegetables. It is difficult to put into words the visceral satisfaction I feel as that sharp blade glides through, yea cleanly severs, the sinewy tendons of celery stalks. Time would fail me to describe those magical endorphins that explode in every sphere of my cerebral cortex lighting untold numbers of synapses like a million lights at Dollywood when I get to mince an onion or a garlic bulb. Once I nearly blacked out from making a Greek Salad for a party of eight. I currently own a nice Cutco chopper but I'm saving up for the Rachel Ray set. Hers even comes with a wood block and the kitchen shears.

My family and I have been weathering Hurricane Gustav this weekend here on the Gulf Coast. Every hurricane season I make a new oath to relocate up state or out to Colorado but we never do. Somehow I settle down again and find myself in new wonder of the massive live oaks, trees in their hundreds with low-hanging branches over the streets of Mobile, in the parks, or in front of trailer homes that are known hurricane magnets. The oaks appear indiscriminate where they stand and their mossy branches offer shade and housing to squirrels or to anyone else around. The bayway crosses eight miles between Mobile and Baldwin counties over what the Spaniards called "the Bay of the Holy Spirit" about 500 years ago when they came to visit. Sometimes I sense something of His presence as I drive back and forth over the water that is often so low you can see the baited crab traps. Sometimes I hear Him whisper, "I made this bay." Sometimes I just hear Him say, "Slow down, you're scaring Me again."

When I don't know what else to do I cook. Donna says I can do a lot with one bag of carrots. I've been cooking a lot lately because I'm in a particularly transitional state of mind. I feel the tectonic plates of my soul shifting around inside me and it makes me feel very anxious. I told a friend on the phone this weekend that it feels like I'm one of the Flying Zambinis. I have worked the trapeze for years but my grip is getting weak. The powder on my hands is gunking up from my sweating palms and I'm looking down for a net every few seconds. I suddenly feel like I've let go of one trapeze and can't quite grab the one that should be swinging toward me. If there is an audience they must be holding their collective breath. My biggest fear is that there really is no audience.

So I cooked a pizza this morning to relieve some stress over myself, my future, Gustav. We'd already stacked or removed anything from the deck and yard that could become projectiles and I spent seven hours Saturday cleaning out and reorganizing the garage just in case I needed to find something. I got up at four this morning to check the status of the storm and prayed for New Orleans a little. Is God mad at them for drinking too much? I slept a little more and then decided to chop.

It is amazing what lives in a refrigerator. If the people of New Orleans weren't so needy we could start a program for neglected food items turned science experiments. By the time I scraped the four corners of my fridge I had unearthed black and green olives, Baby Portobello and white mushrooms, yellow onion, pepperoni, ground beef from the freezer, red and green bell peppers, mozzarella and parmesan cheese and a jar of Newman's spaghetti sauce. Oh, and a pre-cooked crust. Making dough is never as dear to me as chopping.

I felt a light rush at the base of my skull as I opened the drawer that cradles my favorite Cutco. My friend Nancy says we're the only family that still has the cardboard covers to all our knives but that's only because I don't have the Rachel Ray woodblock yet.