What I Learned From My Sonion

I'm sure you won't be suprised that I didn't like vegetables when I was a kid. My mom could coax me into eating a select few vegetables, but with the condition that they had to be smothered in melted cheese. When I became vegetarian, she thought I would probably starve to death. At 17, I didn't even eat lettuce and tomato on my sandwiches.
After a few months of eating nothing but bean and cheese tacos and a wide variety of corn chips, I finally realized I needed to eat a vegetable or two if I was going to carry on with my vegetarian lifestyle. But there were some vegetables I would NEVER eat! NEVER, NEVER, NEVER! Especially ONIONS! I was steadfast in my hatred for the Devil's vegetable. Just the smell of onion could trigger my gag reflex.
Years went by, and I came to develop a taste for yellow squash, asparagus and spinach - vegetables I thought I would never like. Lettuce and tomatoes donned my sandwiches, even sprouts, and an occasional cucumber - but never onion. At restaurants, I always asked the waiter to hold the onion, please. Although, if it was cooked enough that I couldn't see it, smell it or taste it, I wouldn't complain.
All my friends knew how odious I considered onions to be, and none were terribly offended when they cooked for me and I pushed all the onions to the side of the plate. (At least, I hope not!) A couple of years ago, for my birthday, some friends even gave me an onion as a gag gift.
My Sonion, as he came to be known, would never make it into any of my cooking. He merely served as a decoration in our little kitchen. For months he sat there in the same spot, with his sad little face. He began to sprout a little mohawk, that grew taller and taller, and finally wilted over. Oh, Sonion...
One morning, I woke up and Sonion wasn't in his usual spot! I went to investigate, and found that, in desperation, he had jumped into an empty pot that was sitting on the stove! Silly Sonion, didn't he know I would never love him? A suicide attempt couldn't change that.
Six months later, we were moving back to the States, and Sonion just couldn't come with us. And so I built a funeral pyre and invited some friends over to watch Sonion burn. It was a bittersweet affair.
Not long after the move, I was missing some of the food I would eat in Mexico, especially my best friend's home cooking. I had her email me a couple of my favorite recipes - both of which had onion in them.
Ugh! Couldn't I just leave it out?! Usually when a recipe required onion, I would leave it out and throw in some extra garlic. But I knew that I liked my friend's recipes just the way she made them - so I decided to do things her way. I would just mince the onion very fine, and cook it down until it didn't have any flavor. And whaddaya know? It turned out alright.
I started using onion in my cooking from time to time, just for those recipes. But these days, I cook with onion pretty regularly. I don't even curse when I'm chopping it up! Now, I can even share a recipe with you, that isn't modified to exclude onion.
I think Sonion would have wanted it that way.

Cold-Day Lentil Soup

1 yellow onion, chopped well
1/4 cup olive oil
1 cup carrots, chopped
2-3 stalks of celery, chopped
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried basil
1 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
1 can diced tomatoes (dice 1-2 fresh tomatoes, if preferred)
2 cups dry lentils
8 cups water
1/2 cup spinach, rinsed and thinly sliced
2 Tbsp vinegar (can add more, for taste)
Salt and pepper to taste

Warm the oil in a skillet and add the onion, carrots and celery. Sautee for 6-7 minutes, stirring frequently.
Add garlic, oregano, basil and cayenne. Stir and sautee for a couple more minutes. Turn the heat off and set aside.
Put the lentils, water and tomato in a large pot and bring to a boil. Mix in the vegetables and lower the heat. Simmer for one hour.
Add vinegar, spinach, salt and pepper. Serve it up with toast or crackers. Tastes great with a little hot sauce!

Red Lips

Texas summers are a force to be reckoned with. While air conditioning is not my best friend (especially when the control switch is in the wrong hands), I do admit that it makes life a bit more tolerable when it's 100+ degrees during the day and drops down to 80 degrees only in the middle of the night. But really, the best remedy for escaping this infernal heat is a long dip in a cold swimming hole.
I love swimming too, it's such a lovely sensation. When I'm underwater I can hear myself think, without the static of the outside world. The only sounds are the bubbles coming out of my nose and the swoosh of the water I'm pulling myself through. Then I bob up for air and, for a second, I can hear children splashing and squealing, a lifeguard's whistle, birds squawking over territory, general cacophany. Now, back down into the silence. That's nice...
Lately when I've afforded myself the luxury of getting lost in thought underwater, I try to imagine what it must have been like in the old days. I go swimming at Deep Eddy Pool, which I recently discovered is the oldest swimming pool in Texas. Originally it was a swimming hole in the Colorado River, where cold springs came up and a boulder formed an eddy where people would swim. The concrete pool was built in 1915 by A.J. Eilers. In the 1920s, the pool was the centerpiece of a resort - the Deep Eddy Bathing Beach - with attractions such as a zip line, a slide, a ferris wheel, and Lorena's Diving Horse.
This is the most fascinating bit to me. A diving horse! This was an attraction popular from the 1880s until the WWII era in which a horse would dive from a platform - sometimes as high as 60 feet up, and sometimes with a costumed rider atop its back. When I was a kid, the Disney channel would always play this movie called Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken that was based on the life of horse diver Sonora Webster Carver. In 1931, Sonora and her horse "Red Lips" lost their balance on the platform. Sonora survived the fall, but was blinded (caused by detached retinas in both eyes). She continued horse-diving while blind. I probably watched that movie at least ten times, and I cried my heart out every time when she found out she was blind.
These days at Deep Eddy, no diving is allowed, even for humans. But as far as I know, cannonballs haven't been outlawed!

D-04

self-righteous ramblings of an EX-smoker

not really. i barely even qualify. if you know me well, you might still think i'm a smoker, and i wouldn't hold it against you. i was going to write a little eulogy to smoking for the one-month anniversary of my quit date. but i'm already starting to forget the romance i once shared with my cigarettes.
let me think... marlboro lights, marlboro light 100s, winston, camel lights, camel wides, parliament lights, nat sherman MCDs, delicados, faros, american spirits, bali shag... i smoked all of these regularly at one time or another. i reveled in smoking, the rituals, lighters, bumming smokes, giving cigs to a friend in need. i loved comiserating with fellow smokers - talking about how little or how much we smoke, how non-smokers just don't understand, how this tobacco is superior to that and menthols are just nasty, etc etc etc... all in a big old cloud of smoke.
i was 16 when i tried my first cigarette. lots of kids were smoking by then, not just the "bad" ones. i had scorned smoking whole-heartedly from an early age, so my decision to try it out says something about how desperate things got in high school. my friend had a pack that someone had bought for her a few weeks earlier. she slept over and, when my parents had gone to sleep, we went to the backyard. i really expected to hate the cigarette. i thought i would gag or cough or puke or pass out, but instead when i inhaled, i felt warm and light-headed and... well, good. after that first taste it became a weekend affair, to go somewhere and drink coffee and smoke three or four or more cigarettes.
still under age, i had to find ways of getting cigarettes illegally, which made it all the more thrilling. if i couldn't find someone who was old enough to buy them, it was only a matter of finding a cigarette machine. ahh, the good old days... the easiest one to hit up was at the waffle house, where we went to drink coffee and smoke anyway. within a few months i had even gotten a job there, which coincided with my increased dedication to the career of smoking.
i'll spare you the details of my habit for the next (oh god, was it really that long?) 14 years. i can't say that my life was more or less exciting because i smoked cigarettes. i wouldn't know because i was smoking my head off the whole time. it was just how i identified myself, sort of like being left-handed, but more aromatic and with frequent coughing.
anyway, whatever, i quit on july 5. i loved smoking. i said so frequently. i didn't really plan to quit. i just smoked myself sick on independence day. i was sick for two days and couldn't smoke, and then it didn't make sense to go out and buy a pack and start it all over again.
quitting really began on the third day... that day was awful. but a few days after that i decided that i shouldn't count how many days i had gone without smoking. it seemed like if i was counting, i was building it up more and giving myself a reason to smoke again. like i was testing myself to see how long i could go, and when the time was right i would reward myself with a cigarette. i don't know... i still can't really explain my own reasoning, but i do know that it got easier when i decided not to count. i wasn't thinking so much about smoking, or not smoking, after that. i think most of my physical withdrawal had passed by then, but i needed that edge for the mental part of it.
the time was right, i think. i still want a cigarette every now and then. hell, talking about it now makes me want one! but the feeling passes, like it never did before.
so goodbye cigarettes... thanks for nothing.

Rainy Days and Mondays

Nothing like standing at the bus stop in the rain in a garbage bag to make you feel like a complete a-hole... When the bus driver trudges through the murky lake of what used to be the right lane, ensuring that you're entirely soaked before he comes to a stop, you really wonder where you went wrong. Dripping, you step onto a bus filled with the chatter of a bunch of high school kids and pull out your bus pass. It's wet. You can't slide it. The driver scowls at you before letting you sit down. The A/C on full blast for the duration of the ride home doesn't so much dry you off as chill you to the bone. The crazy girl keeps staring at you. Maybe you're the crazy one staring...
C'est la vie, baby! Where's the laugh track?
Time for some tunes, fuzzy socks and jigsaw puzzle with my loves.