Saturday, January 9th, 2010

Nutmeg: A Krishna Scent

Thunder Bay, Ontario

While trekking and making the crispy sound with feet on dry snow, I flashed back to the night before. I was in the home of a couple offering me a light meal. Cauliflower cream soup was on the menu. Warm and tasty at the first slurp, it threw me back to 50 years before. I must admit I had that moment, a real moment of an endearing past. Mom was there and I could see her with the hot pot of the same dish. The nutmeg spice made the difference. It was that aroma, if anything, that helped to capture the nostalgic moment. I was about to explode in emotion. Only a tear was about to slide off into the dish which did not prescribe any more salt. Now back to our current time. I sat curious about the prep’s ingredients. All was there as Mom used to make. I got hurled back to the 50’s, to the country house at supper time. The atmosphere was ‘family’. It was comforting.

The cook, a very calm woman with an equally calm husband, is a family lawyer by profession.

“You must see a lot of broken hearts amongst clients?” I asked her after inquiring about the recipe.

“A lot, an awful lot!” she said affirmedly.

“What accounts for the great amount of dysfunctionality?”

“Too much high expectation,” she said, “is one of the main causes.”

Back on the road (Moutain Park Road to be precise), outside Thunder Bay, I was completing my routine daily walk and heading back for a meal with the Jani family. There they had invited Professor Berg of Lakehead University. He is a lover of “The Mahabharata” and “The Ramayana”, and a teacher of those epics. When nighttime did befall Prof. Berg arrived with companion. We immersed ourselves in the flavour and taste of something so very eastern and not the cauliflower soup. The post meal dialogue was the consequential ethics of The Gita’s subject matter. “What is moral?” was Arjuna’s quandary. It was so refreshing hearing a scholar’s view on the depth of the Gita and how it includes the subject of family and teachers, and acting in their defense and offence. Bhisma and Drona to be sacrificed.

For the evening chat, issues of the Gita were explored, but in the end, it was nutmeg, a flash of Krishna’s scent, that occupied my thought as eyelids closed for the night.

8 Km