Avocado Lemon Soup

An Open Letter to Andie MacDowell

     Today started like any other.  It was on account of not being able to sleep again.  We had rented a Hammer film, with Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, which was alright.  But when it ended I found myself idling by the window, just sort of twiddling my thumbs.  I lacked that disconnectable quality, at such a desperate moment, to subject myself to another viewing of a film that had just ended.  For whatever reason—to find an undisclosed depth to the film (which it lacked), or to simply avoid confrontation with daylight—I could not bring myself to watch it again.  But I sort of dreaded the sunrise, which was already materializing over Greenfield.

     I set out for Giant Eagle where I would buy sleeping pills to be scarfed down like M&M’s, and the New York Times.  The produce aisle stood empty.  Produce is one of those things most people don’t find themselves needing at seven in the morning too often.  All the same it was rather liberating to walk past it all, really slowly, and imagine the things that could be made, cooking aromas the likes that made Marc Chagall’s head come off his body and fly around the room pursuing wreaths from his mother’s stovetop.  You could see it in his paintings, his writing, and according to him, in his life too.  I was contemplating soups:
 

Purees of Red and Yellow Roasted Peppers above Cauliflower Cream with Onions. Sweet Potato and New Potato Bok Choy with Lemon Zest, Enoki Mushrooms, with… and I laughed at the absurdity (since there was no one looking) with Avocado!

It seemed a ridiculous and incompatible combination at first.  And I concocted many others equally as outrageous as I moved through the back of the store, along the rear aisle with its slight traffic of big men and their bags of doughnuts.      I picked up the sleeping pills and stood a while going over the magazine rack.  Perhaps it was that my eyes were glassy, hence their eyes seemed glassy.  People on the covers wearing next to nothing.  People in haut couture, like they’d all just returned from the same sort of funereal orgying.  I don’t know.  I do know that your eyes seemed clear enough.  There was that scene in The End of Violence.  You were all fucked up in bikini underwear and a bathrobe.  But it was just a role.  And here you are getting married again, for real.

      The photo of you in another bridal gown with another bouquet.  Weddings In Style.  The thought even occurred to me to pick out your magazines from the rack and sit them in front of the panty hose nearby, so people wouldn’t associate you with all those pathetic eyes so convoluted of sex and despair.   I sort of lost sight of you for a while.  To speak of that space cleaved between you and the sex and despair I cant help wondering what happened to you.

     In Sex, Lies, and Videotape you were able to keep your eyes perfectly still while your mouth slowly moved to generate words in which your feelings and confusion might fit.  And then, as if by provocation of the supernatural, a miracle occurred:  Your eyes began to search.  Casting it through the night on film I could see the despair come surging out of you ‘til all that was left were your recorded investigations of sexuality.

     You were on the cover of a magazine for brides—aren’t you always?  Aren’t you always getting married?  I thought about how you wouldn’t be such an easy person to give up on, the way many others had obviously done.  Or perhaps you left them?  Now there was a multiplying faction of lost men wedding rings from Andie MacDowell and corresponding issues of Modern Bride, or Weddings In Style, or whatever.  I wondered whether or not I could make a soup that could make you stay.  I mean, I doubt the other guys even gave it a serious thought.  Probably had it all staked on jewelry and weekend getaways to spas owned by Robert Redford where people lie around in baths of dog shit all day and have slices of cucumber dramatically placed above their closed eyes—at least I assume they’re closed.  And the best perk would be that inevitable moment when Redford would show up and pretend he believed in all that shit.

     Listen Andie, I have this soup made with bok choy, and enoki mushrooms, and even some avocados.  It sounds funny I know.  I laughed when I conceived of it in the produce aisle of the Giant Eagle in my neighborhood.  You see, I have this horrible insomnia.  It’s pretty unremarkable, save for the fact that I wind up in strange places when I have no good business being there—kind of like the opposite of sleepwalking.  I mean, sleeping pills at seven am for Christ’s sake!  The New York Times.  I read the news infrequently.

    At seven AM you can touch the produce, feel for its character.  Turn it over.  Kind of get to know it, all the things that constitute Avocado Lemon Soup.  I would even draw a circle in crème fraiche on the face if your soup to symbolize a wedding ring.  You can eat it so I don’t have to keep staring at it once you’re gone, remarried.

    Well, best of luck

        All my renewed admiration,
        Bryan C. Mickle