One weekend they went to look at houses on the market, and she unexpectedly discovered an ability that she had not known she possessed. The ability to walk into a house for sale and sense if its last owner was living or not. Now in theory, this sounds like a faintly unpleasant if not downright morbid skill. Not nearly as amiable for instance, as the ability to knit argyle sweaters or play the ukulele. But in practice she found it to be an oddly sweet faculty. The soft crackling feeling that would settle around her shoulders like a magic cloak as she ran her hand across a tiled kitchen counter, felt a floorboard creak underfoot, or as she gazed out a bedroom window at the view someone had woken up to for sixty years. The feeling of being enveloped in a present absence. The sense of something or someone, both here and also not. Her husband smiled the first time she whispered the feeling to him. And then the real estate agent confirmed it. When this happened a second and third time he nodded his head thoughtfully. 

And she began to consider the things we leave behind in daily life, in daily ways, without deeply considering them. Only because most of us believe we can go back for things whenever we want to. But in the end that isn’t true is it? No one can go back. No matter how much they want to. No matter what they left behind. And what they leave behind are things. In the end, with things it’s not take it or leave it. It’s just — leave it. And this is what renders thingishness so precious– despite the bad rap it gets in lofty circles. Lofty circles tend to pride themselves on a preference for the intangible.

What they forget in their earnestness, she realized, is that life is the only place in the universe where we get to experience both. Granted when you are intangible you are invincible. But what is invincibility worth in a world without interruptions, inclement weather, innkeepers or inkfish? Invincibility without tangibility is redundant. Like sunscreen lotion in Plato’s cave.

When you are tangible you can harbor inklings, and intuitions, you can cock your head and listen to invisible music. When you are tangible it is given to you to dabble in the intangible. But when you are intangible your dabbling days are over. So are your days of dawdling, dueling and decorating cakes. And this may seem counter intuitive but — so are your days of doing nothing. When you are intangible doing nothing is no longer on the menu. Menus are no longer on the menu. So if you harbor a fondness for doodling, or a yearning for yodeling, if you are pining for pine-scented trails, have a passion for passionfruit, a hankering for pressed handkerchiefs, or just the simple desire to jump to a conclusion, fish for a compliment, forgive a trespass, retrieve your soul, or go salsa dancing at sunset, you would be well advised to press your advantage while you are tangible. Undertakings like undertakers work best on this side of eternity.

And remember, when it comes time to be intangible none of the thingishness comes with. Not the favorite brass lamp, or the flowering plum tree, not the love notes, not the lover, nor the long twilights of summer…This is not by any means a new thought. But it can be a shockingly new realization.

And all this being so, if that were you then, stepping with no feet, off the edge of this world, and into the nameless next–  wouldn’t you choose to float one last time at your bedroom window? And if you happened to find someone standing there with her eyes full of dreams– just as you used to– wouldn’t you find a way to tap her shoulder lightly? Wouldn’t you too want to remind someone, before you go, to cherish it all? This singular world of dreams, of views, of eyes and shoulders, of touch, and light.

First a riddle:

One of those beings whom it is difficult to describe pleasantly.  Overpowering, off-putting, unshapely. And yet…And yet in the right context, with the right collaborators, her essence transmutes her edges into something altogether irreplaceable. She softens into subtle appreciation, imbues her community with richness and depth, and vanishes entirely in the process. Closely examined, her powers are mystical, even saintly.

Next a clue:

She’s believed to have traveled across the Hindu Kush with Alexander’s army. Long after the would-be conquerors turned to dust, she remained in India, having vanquished the subcontinent without raising a finger. [Remember: To be mighty is not the same thing as to be long-lived.] Her perpetuity has something to do perhaps, with her gift of elevating all around her. Her talent for punching up the bland existence of others. Her wisdom lies in knowing that life aspires to savor and be savored. Her greatness lies in devoting herself unreservedly to this warm-blooded dream.

Now the answer:

She is asafoetida.

A speculation:

Unbeautiful and deeply desired, her strange charisma is such that you will find her written into ancient scriptures, praised for the medicine of her presence, admired for her virtues, invited into every home– but left out of almost all poetry. Not everything that delights us is deemed lyrical. Some entities travel on bright limbs and lithe syllables. Like hummingbirds, sunflowers, saffron and starlight. Ravens, and raindrops, driftwood, and snail shells. Tumbleweed, tidepools, barnacles and temple bells. They find their way into poems with the ease of an otter slipping into its river. Other beings are more burdened, in that their selves and syllables do not lilt, they lumber. They are not the sort to ripple or reverberate, rather they lie athwart, like a boulder on a narrow mountain pass. Interrupting the flow of traffic and thoughts, of rhythm and rhyme.  This does not empty them of poetic possibility. Not at all! But not everyone recognizes this. Perhaps this is why poems about asafoetida are few and far between.

A lesson in language

We humans are a fickle lot, fueled by a potent mixture of ignorance, enthusiasm, arrogance and grace. We make up our minds– but our minds are so very different. Contradictions are bound to abound. In bygone days asafoetida was called Food of the Gods by the Persians. Today the French, Turks, Germans and others call her some version of — Devil’s Dung. Celestial seasoning to some, an utter abomination to others. This is not a problem, but a paradox. They are not the same thing. Sometimes what is lost in translation is subtle and wafting, like a nuance. Sometimes it is teeming and weighty– like a world. 

The anatomy of a spice

No matter the name it is assigned, this noxious spice is derived from Ferula asafoetida, a perennial herb with lacy green leaves that grows to nearly seven feet. Every part of this plant exudes a fetid scent. The roots of this plant contain a milky sap. Cut the stalk close to the ground before flowering season, and the sap will dry into an odorous, plentiful resin–as much as two pounds of resin in three months. This reeking resin, long out of daily use in its countries of origin, ignored by much of the rest of the world, is a prized spice in India. To the native nose, a single whiff is enough to be unmistakable. This malodorous spice disappears into Indian delicacies and everyday fare alike, where it miraculously tempers itself, and all things alongside it into a difficult-to-describe form of deliciousness. If you think of asafoetida as an Indian spice, you would be both right and wrong. The country that accounts for an estimated 40% of the global consumption of asafoetida, imports it from the mountains of Iran and Afghanistan (more than 12,000 tonnes a year.) To be native to a place is nice, but one does not become a celebrity by staying at home. Every spice knows, to be properly feted, one must venture abroad. And so it is with this strangest and smelliest of spices. There is in this fact, odd comfort to be had.

The takeaway (that is also the giveback):

Maybe asafoetida reminds us that there is place in this world for every eccentricity– including our own. Reminds us that every obnoxious tendency we encounter is also a potent gift, awaiting the hot oil of life’s frying pan. Maybe we too are destined to spill our singular flavor into everything– and vanish without a trace.

And today I would like to speak to you of a place called Costco, whose full name is Costco Wholesale Corporation. The wikipedia entry on Costco says it operates a chain of membership-only big-box retail stores and that it is the fifth largest retailer in the world. Also according to wikipedia, Costco has 804 warehouses worldwide — including 27 in Japan, 16 in South Korea, and 1 in Iceland. I do not know if wikipedia is telling the truth about any of this, so if you are particular about facts, please do your own investigations. I want to believe that even though Costco is very big, it is also benign. More brontosaurus than T-Rex. But this might be wishful thinking. I do know, that even though Costco requires membership, like a club, unlike a club you do not have to wear fancy clothes to enter. Footwear, however, is mandatory. Also, you must be able to flash a membership card at the disinterested staff person stationed at the entrance. I believe this would be more entertaining for everyone involved if the cards were designed to look like FBI badges. But they are not. If you do not have a membership card, you must walk closely to someone who does (preferably someone you know and who knows you). Before you enter Costco you must take possession of a big red shopping cart. It is so big that you do not think you can fill it even with a year’s worth of shopping. This is because you do not know or do not remember what it means to shop at Costco. Once you enter Costco it is like you have died and gone to warehouse heaven– or hell (depending on your perspective.) The ceilings are very high, everything is packed in ginormous boxes and mostly comes in multiples of fifteen, fifty, or five hundred Every shopping trip to Costco feels a little bit like you are stocking up for Y2K even though Y2K was twenty-two years ago and very anticlimactic for those of us who believed that it would involve computer meltdowns and biblical floods. The first time my husband and I bought toilet paper at Costco we ended up having to leave it in the trunk of our car for the better part of a year because there was no room in our little studio for a package of 64 rolls of individually wrapped TP (it happens to be one of their best-selling items.) At Costco there are many people in plastic shower caps and red aprons standing behind little tables, and handing out exotic food samples — for example, granola bars packed with goji berries, chia seeds and cacao nibs, that have been cut up into little bits and placed in thimble-sized pleated paper cups. For the most part these people do not look very excited about the products they are selling. I think this might be because they are remembering a time when life was simpler and full of more poetic possibility. In any case they do not come at you with an aggressive sales pitch. They do not have to. Costco is full of weary warehouse travelers like me, whose energy has been vastly depleted by wandering up and down endless aisles of things one does not strictly need, but possibly wants (like a box the size of a carry-on suitcase, full of Belgian chocolates). Fatigued explorers that we are, we stumble upon these food-sample-stands with the delirious enthusiasm of souls lost in the desert who have miraculously chanced upon a verdant oasis. Soon we will be stacking our carts with cases of goji berry-chia seed-cacao nib granola bars that come 136 to the box. My fellow countrymen and countrywomen are known to frequent Costco in large numbers. You can see the mesmerizing array of dark mustaches on the men. You can hear the jingle of the mangalsutras on the women — we make every step sound like Christmas. We walk through this barcoded wonderland where you can buy frozen chappatis in a pack of 50, and a burlap sack of aged basmati rice so big you think you’ll need an elephant to lift it. We stroll through the store as if it were but a crowded city park. We point, we murmur, we move on, as our big red carts slowly fill. At no juncture do we give any indication that we are intimately familiar with another time and place. A time when taps were opened slowly and closed tightly, and leftovers distributed by nightfall. A time when shoppers could carry everything they bought in a medium-sized jute bag recycled from a sari shop. A time when drawstring coin purses were tucked into sari blouses, when plastic wrap was rarely removed and packaging never thrown away. A place where abundance isn’t the measure of how much you can heap in a big red shopping cart, but an unspoken awareness of how little it truly takes– to fill one small red heart.

I believe windows are celebrated in direct proportion to the degree one is conscious of circumscription. For those who live a seemingly free range existence, oblivious of external limits, the window’s presence and function is assumed. Simultaneously looked through– and overlooked. Unregistered as the pattern of curtains in a neighbor’s home, or the direction of the thieving wind that rifles casually through the hillside untouchable by man made laws. 

Windows exist to be looked through yes, but they are not meant to be overlooked. Being transparent is not the same thing as being insignificant. In this way windows are related to the invisible. Put another way: if you do not have a meaningful relationship with windows, then it is possible, that you have some difficulty perceiving grace.

For those whose days are contained, and conscious, the window is as impossible to overlook as a peacock or a comet. It is a portal, a bridge, an altar and avenue whose significance is vital and imperative to life. A window is the infinite, framed in a rectangle of glass, granting depth, mystery and the possibility of exploration to actors who play daily in very small, forgotten theaters. Patients in hospital beds understand the silent sustenance of windows. So do prisoners. And largely housebound creatures with vast interior lives — like dogs, cats, very young humans, very old ones–and Emily Dickinson. 

It must be mentioned here that for optimal results windows must not be overzealously substituted for walls. A residence where all walls double as windows soon grows tedious and disconcerting. A reverse prison. Celebrities and goldfish understand this better than most.  It is sometimes necessary to explain to denizens of the modern world, that television is not the same thing as a window. Neither is your browser. They bear certain overt similarities yes — but overt similarity is a very low bar for most things. A table and a panther are similar in that they both have four legs. But you cannot interchange them without attracting notice and untoward consequences.

If you find it absolutely necessary to draw comparisons, then a window is more like a book or a boat than a television or a computer screen. Should the occasion demand it you may swap one for the other without hesitation or catastrophic result.

The undershirt is the shirt that is not meant to be seen. The undershirt is a private shirt that exists primarily to preserve the outward appearance of the public shirt– the shirt that is worn over the undershirt. The private shirt, the shirt we do not see, is the shirt that does the heavy lifting. The private shirt is the shirt that absorbs the wear and tear of inner life, so that the public shirt, the shirt we do see, does not have to. Because of the shirt that we do not see, the youthful appearance of the shirt that we do see is prolonged, making it significantly harder, if not entirely impossible, to accurately guess the age of the public shirt. In this way the private shirt, the shirt that we do not see, in other words, the undershirt, is not unlike the portrait of Dorian Gray. Though as far as we know no Faustian pacts were involved in its making.

(And yes, it’s true. “Dorian Gray jokes never get old.”)

There is a very small hole in my husband’s gray pants. We noticed it a couple weeks ago when it came back from the dry cleaner’s. Not to imply that the dry cleaners are responsible for it, though they well may be. But just that that is when the hole first came to our attention. It is the size of a new crayon tip, and located in the region of the left pocket. Because it is in the locality of the pocket, it is not an empty space one glimpses through the hole but the whiteness of the white silk pocket lining. A small dot of white on an otherwise gray pair of pants. It is not very noticeable unless you already know it is there, in which case it is impossible not to notice it. We forgot about it until, this morning my husband put on the pair of pants and discovered the hole anew. “Why don’t we color it in?” I suggest. This proposal has all the sophistication of a first-grader. He is game to try it. I find a gray pen and begin to color in the hole, but my efforts do not go very far. The cloth does not take the ink. I pull out a black calligraphy pen then, working under the dubious premise that a black dot on a gray pair of pants is somehow less egregious than a white one. But even the stubborn ink of the calligraphy pen leaves little mark on our little white spot. It is bright as a tiny moon and just as persistent. I could try and sew over it with gray thread I say doubtfully. My mother is, but I am not, an accomplished seamstress. I don’t think that will work says my husband, who in most cases thinks I can do anything. But even his generous imagination falls short in this instance.