DELAWARE, Ohio —
A few Saturdays ago, I woke from a nap craving my mother’s baked beans. Maybe it’s because I will be a grandfather in a few months. I know how migratory the mind can be. Or maybe it’s because we were about to bomb Syria.
I am surprised how easily Mr. Putin outfoxed Mr. Obama. The exceptional American made to look foolish by the evil Russian. I try to imagine the moment of embarrassment when Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry looked at each other, the blood rushing in their necks, their cheeks burning like hot brass, their bellies aching, because that’s how men (and boys) feel when they are embarrassed.
There will be a baby shower in a few weeks, a circle of gathered women. To this day I do not know what goes on at a baby shower, but the planning tells me it is something special. Women will be arriving from all over the country. There will be gifts and food. When I was a boy, one day I walked into my grandmother’s house from the barn and there were four generations of women in the parlor. They were talking and laughing, but when they saw me they went silent. My grandmother told me there were cookies in the pantry and I should get myself some and wouldn’t they taste good. I went for the cookies and while I forget what kind they were, I have always remembered those women talking and laughing and how quiet they went when they saw me standing there and have long since wondered what the talking and laughing could have been about.
These days I feel my edges falling away. I am sure this is weakness. What else could it be in this armed and dangerous land of ours? When people learn that I teach they sometimes launch into lengthy condemnations of young people: their music, their laziness, their callowness. This makes my blood boil. Young people do not make war. Young people do not decide to send off the drones. But young people will be there to do the dirty work when the old people tell them to. Young people will be there to shovel the manure.
It seems that all my life we have been bombing someone, teaching them a lesson. Every day I understand more deeply how violent we are. Violent to others and violent to ourselves.
For most of my life I ate baked beans for dinner and supper on Saturdays and leftovers on Sunday and Monday. Baked beans taste good hot or cold. Baked beans go with hot dogs or sliced ham, potato salad, coleslaw, sauerkraut, and afterward we’d have chocolate cake or slabs of apple pie. Food was meant to keep you going. The cows needed to be fed and milked twice a day every day. They still do and in between there are endless chores.
Maybe our leaders, who seem so quick to threaten violence or shut down the government, should spend some time with dairy cows. They are ponderous ships of milk. There are infinite births to attend. They slow time. They are female.
The little girl will be named Alice. There are Alices on both sides of her family. My grandmother Alice also made baked beans every Saturday, as did her mother. As my mother says, “That’s a hundred years of baked beans and it’s been more than that.”
Will Alice be shy? Will she love to read books? Will she be paid equal to the men she works with? Will she be safe, when restless at night, to go for a run?
When Alice went to Wonderland she, too, found a world of nonsense, riddles and contradictions: the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, a cake that reads EAT ME, the sleepy dormouse, the grinning Cheshire Cat, the raging Queen of Hearts, “Off with her head!” Alice finds Wonderland to be stupid and phony and takes her leave. Alice, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield — just as old people have their opinions about young people, so, too, do young people have their opinions about the old.
We are a brawling, righteous, pompous, ignorant people, a land of blowhards to the right and left. Our warlike impulses and warlike pride are dangerously coupled with our insufferable vanity, our permanent immaturity, our lives of fear and pleasure. The very land we stand on was taken from someone else and made profitable by people who did not own themselves. There’s a mass shooting and we have a phony little debate over gun control, but no one on the right or the left talks about suicide by gun. We are violently disposed to others and we are just as violently disposed to ourselves. But I read crime is on the decline. Something about leaded gas. Maybe we have not been so bad after all, maybe the greatest generation was simply poisoned by itself.
But the young people still decide to bring babies into this mess of a world. It’s because the young people keep faith with humanity. It’s the young people who believe in the better future. It’s the young people who have yet to lose their minds, their imaginations, their wonder, their intent to give life rather than take it.
I assemble the ingredients: navy beans or soldier beans, salt pork, molasses and sugar. That’s all you need: beans, salt pork, molasses and sugar. You soak the beans overnight in a kettle and in the morning you add the salt pork and parboil them an hour or so until they are a bit soft. Then you add a half-cup of sugar and a half-cup of molasses. This goes in the oven, lid on, at 400 degrees for about three hours. From time to time you may have to add water, making sure they are covered an inch or so.
If I begin tonight they’ll be ready by dinnertime tomorrow.
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