Grey's Journal:
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On Halloween, my Bulgarian friend and I traveled to the British Museum to see a new exhibit on death opening that day, but the British Museum had other plans for us. According to them, the best day to open an exhibit on death and dying was not on the Day of the Dead as advertised, but on the following Monday. So, not to disappoint the Bulgarian, I took her on a tour of my favorite parts of the Museum and finished with the creepy Henry Wellcome collection as our Halloween stand-in. We viewed Mr Wellcome's opstrepical forceps, amputation saws, painful chastity devices and listened to a description on how to make a shrunken head (cut down the back of the head with a knife so you can pull the skin off the skull. Then boil the flesh in water until it reaches the desired size). Naturally, after such a display, we decided it was time for dinner. We headed over to a temporary food fair held in Covent Garden. In the piazza about 50 to 75 vendors had erected booths to sell their unique delicacies. Each vendor and their booth tried to out folksy the others. They brought Tree trunks for tables, stumps for seats, and state-of-the-art 18th century food processing equipment. This was usually made of brass and had mysterious circular dials and levers sticking out in odd places. The equipment looked like a cross between the controls of a steam locomotive, that horrible '3D pipes' windows screensaver, and H G Well's time machine. Despite its strange appearance, one of these devices produced the best hot apple cider I've ever had. At one booth a young man, after giving me a delicious slice of cheese, explained how in his family, cheese making was a right of passage for the men. The pride in his voice told me he recently produced his first perfect wheel of cheddar. He talked in a slow, relaxed way I thought only US Southerners were capable of. He transported me from the busy, crowded market in the center of London to his back porch. In my mind we sat overlooking his family's farmland with a pitcher of cider and a wedge of cheese between us -- we had been the best and easiest of friends for many years. An old man in a nearby booth sold more kinds of mushrooms than I ever guessed existed. Looking at him made me think of the line from The Lord of the Rings where Treebeard describes what Ents are: `Sheep get like shepherd, and shepherds like sheep, but it is quicker and closer with trees and Ents.' This old man spent a great deal of time in the company of mushrooms and grew to be like them. He was short, squat, and his skin was the pale hue of a mushroom stalk. He sat in his chair smoking a pipe dressed in earthy tones with a large, round, orange-red hat on his head. I could have passed him by in the forest and thought nothing more than I didn't know mushrooms could grow that big. In another booth, an attractive, shy, farmer-type girl sold homemade muffins and pastries. While most people quickly made their purchase or moved on, I lingered and made an unnecessary, and very thorough examination of all she had to sell. I tried to think of a conversation starter, but `Nice muffins.' seemed to overtly sexual for such a delicate and shy creature. She would blush and I would feel like a creep. I would have stayed for quite some time struggling for the perfect opening line, but my Bulgarian friend, by now many booths ahead, gave me a what-the-hell-is-taking-you-so-long look, so I smiled at the farm girl and went on my way. As I walked around the fair, I half expected to turn a corner and find my father waiting for me in his own booth. In my high school years, I worked with my father selling pretzels at craft fairs. How my father, a lawyer by trade, got the idea to sell pretzels with his son on the weekends I don't know. But every year when spring came, white, cubical boxes of pretzels he bought from the Pennsylvania Dutch (the Amish) filled our house and garage. I was drafted into bagging them into sizable portions for resale at absurdly high profit margins. My father was quite the salesman. He somehow convinced the craft food board that even though we were selling food, we did not belong in the food section buried at the back of the fair. These pretzels were hand crafted and therefore we belonged in the craft section. Front and center. Our hands never made a single pretzel, but the board didn't ask, and my father didn't offer. "Handmade Pennsylvania Dutch Pretzels!" My father told passersby from our booth, "No fat! No cholesterol! No taste!" This last one would grab the attention long enough so Dad could deliver the real sales line: "And no other food for half a mile!" We always drew a crowd and my father regaled them with tales of the Amish and their pretzel making ways. His energy seemed endless and his enthusiasm was so strong that people who would normally scoff at the idea of paying $3 for a small bag of pretzels found themselves buying two for $5. It was amazing for me to see my father this way. The rest of the year he did peoples' taxes. My father explained the Amish's simple life as part of his routine: their refusal to wear buttons, their lack of a color wardrobe, and their aversion to anything electric. Almost without fail, after every one of these speeches a member of the crowd would ask if we were Amish. I could only let the red apron and buttons speak for themselves. Like any good teenage son, the whole affair embarrassed me. I worried that even though we were far, far from my hometown, someone I knew would see me. This someone always took the form of the girl I liked the most at the time or the guys who were bigger than me in gym class. Selling pretzels in a red apron with your dad did not seem like the apex of cool at the time. Cool or not, we were popular with the locals. No matter how many pretzels we brought, we always sold out. People remembered us from previous years and looked forward to our return. My cuticles were raw by the end of the day from handling so much money in the little pouch around my waste. That money went to support my college education. All these memories came back to me as I wandered around Covent Garden. Despite being in a world of exotic and tempting food, Mrs Bulgaria and I ended up having dinner at the Costa Coffee next to Holburn station as we waited for a walking tour of London entitled: Ghosts, Ghouls, and Guinness. The last word referred to the mandatory pub stop halfway through. The tour guide, like most good guides, presented us with so many names, dates, and interesting stories that there was no way we were going to remember any of it. Catching the facts was like trying to catch a fish with my hands -- a school passing does not make the task any easier. So on tours, I let the facts swim around me, and if one jumps into my hands the day is counted as a success. This time I did catch one: Back in the olden days, when the British Government wanted to make an example of traitors, they held an execution and hung the bodies for all to see in some public place. But, birds would pick the body clean in a few days, leaving behind a less intimidating and unidentifiable skeleton. So to prevent the birds from scavenging, someone soaked the dead body in boiling salt water for several hours before it went on display. I always like learning the solution to problems I didn't know existed. Especially really obvious problems. I wonder why as a child, looking at the picture of a dead man on public display, I didn't turn and ask 'How'd they keep the birds off him, Mom?' While the stories were well told, I couldn't help but feel that ghost stories work better in dark alleyways and narrow side streets. It's hard to fear the supernatural on Tottenham Court Road when double decker buses roar by and there is a Starbucks a few meters away. The guide broke into large, strange smiles at inappropriate moments in his tales. It left me with the impression that he either really loved his job, or he wanted to murder us. Or both. Either way, it was perfect for Halloween. |
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mailing list. Copyright © 2005 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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