Archive for May, 2005

The Locust Tree in Flower

Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

– William Carlos Williams

This week the air has been thick with the scent of locust trees flowering and I’m hit with the sweetness of this May ritual each time I step outside. Clumps of white hang heavy on unassuming branches and swing along the treeline. This could easily go unnoticed, in and out with every breath … as if it were always like this, heady, tinged with something intangible, unrecognizable but familiar. Spring is waning just as fast as it arrived and it suddenly feels like deja vu, like something I ached to name but never knew before, and May is like this when green seems greener and the breeze kicks up and dies down just in front of where I stand. It seems remarkable and I can be fooled into thinking this is a new experience. I’ve peeked through a curtain and discovered something I’ve overlooked and it is then that I am hit with a memory that rushes in faster than the scent that inspired it. I realize that May is not being discovered by me, but rather I am being discovered by this. I’ve lived this moment before, in another life, another world. This moment where the locusts lace their way into summer and petals are falling in clusters, like bunches of grapes and we pick them up like treasures and pull them down like snow. And we squirelled them away like popcorn, like magic, like perfume along a treeline, along a fence row, along a dead end road somewhere long forgotten and recollected again in my past so many years ago.

(Warning: extreme grossness ahead)

Well, now that we’ve all sworn off Wendy’s chili (thanks to the claim by a woman who says she bit down on a human finger while enjoying a nice hot cup of soup) investigators are now saying that story was a hoax and are charging the Las Vegas woman with fraud and attempted grand theft. We’re still not ordering the chili, but as thoughts turn to summer, we’d like to think we can enjoy a nice cup of frozen desert. Not so fast …

N.C. man finds finger in frozen custard
(AP)WILMINGTON, N.C. – A man who ordered a pint of frozen chocolate custard in a dessert shop got a nasty surprise inside — a piece of severed finger lost by an employee in an accident.

Unlike a recent incident at a Wendy’s restaurant in California, no questions of truth have been raised about the finger served up to go at Kohl’s Frozen Custard and found later at home by Clarence Stowers.

Officials from the state departments of agriculture and labor went to the shop Monday, and the owner confirmed one of his employees lost part of a finger in an accident with a food-processing machine. It was not immediately clear how the severed finger got into the custard.

Wilmington television station WWAY reported that Stowers found the finger in frozen custard he purchased Sunday night.

Stowers, who did not immediately return calls Monday from The Associated Press, told the station: “I thought it was candy because they put candy in your ice cream … to make it a treat. So I said, ‘OK, well, I’ll just put it in my mouth and get the ice cream off of it and see what it is.’”

Stowers said he spit the object out, but still couldn’t identify it. So he went to his kitchen, rinsed it off with water — and “just started screaming.”

Make it a treat: Ask for a finger today.

What on earth is going on? Is this something that we have to start worrying about now? Fingers and random parts of who knows what in our food? Of course, I can’t overlook the skin in the sandwich at Arby’s story. (Is anyone else feeling nauseous yet?) Yes, I know there are nasty things in all kinds of food supplies, but skin and fingers? It’s bad enough seeing stray hairs, even with the proliferation of hairnets. But do we have to start wearing hand nets? Steel gloves to avoid carelessly slicing off pieces of our bodies into the fast food supply chain? Oops! What will it take? WHERE WILL IT END??

This gives a whole new meaning to the popular phrase “finger lickin’ good” — but this isn’t KFC. If Russell Simmons wants to get his Def Jams in a bunch over something, how about starting with the pandemic of FINGERS popping up in people’s food??? Huh, Russell!!! HUH!!!?

Or maybe this is some kind of new reality show, a combination of “Punk’d” and “The Amazing Race” … “Where in the World is … THE NEXT FINGER IN A FOOD ITEM???”

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I know I don’t like it and all I will say is that it needs to stop. It needs to stop right now.