Beeting a Dead Horse, Turning 40, and Other Inexplicable Things

Over the past week, readers of this blog have made many excellent beet puns. Out of some sort of misplaced intellectual pride, I wanted to make one, myself, but realized that the good ones had already been taken, and further efforts would be misplaced: beeting a dead horse.

Never mind. I can, theoretically, do whatever I want now because I turned forty today. My friend Sue Spilecki, poet and essayist, once started an essay with the sentence, "Forty is a dangerous age." I can't remember exactly how she phrased the next sentence, something about how, having reached that age, one is finally free to "tell the world to fuck off."

In fact, I don't think I've ever had much trouble telling the world to fuck off, but I've realized lately that sometimes it's better to take a nap than to try to force myself to go to the gym. I believe that's comparably liberating, for someone who occasionally pushes herself too hard. There's a time not to push oneself, a time not to try to do or to understand things.

Because turning forty seems to require some kind of taking stock of life, I thought I'd write about beets and how they can be used in soup stock. (I still haven't given up the beet puns. And anyway, someone asked my opinion on making vegetable stock.) In thinking about it, I realized the process of making stock is like taking stock, like learning a language, like quite a few other things I've been doing lately. One takes pieces--of vegetables, if making stock, but also of a strange language, of memories and information--and does one's best to put them together. At first, they bump up against each other because they're next to each other, but they don't connect or relate to each other. After a while--sometimes a long while--something happens to them. They meld together and form a cohesive whole that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

That's the plan, anyway. I know how to make good soup stock, but pieces will be pieces. Sometimes they don't come together into anything cohesive or coherent. Today in the ceramics studio, I struggled to form little pieces of clay into a bowl. Usually, I can do this. Today I was very distracted. I had just learned about the bombings at the Boston Marathon, maybe an hour and a mile away from me. As I thought about the beginning the day, which had been filled with astonishing connections and love in the form of birthday wishes, and then the afternoon of human atrocities, the pieces would not come together.

I didn't make stock. And I don't know what to say about this strange, very happy, very sad day. What I'll say is this, by Julien Jacob. The words of this song don't exist in any language; Jacob makes them up based on his emotions. They are, in some ways, senseless, but they come together to make more sense--a greater whole than parts--than many things.