Carmen’s Chatter

Torn from some unidentifiable magazine, this 2″x2″ Hormel Chili coupon surprised me when it dropped just now from the book I pulled out of a shelf in my bright yellow kitchen nook.

I learned recently something you probably already know, as I am usually the last to know anything in any category having to do with houses, decorating, furniture, or clothes. A kitchen nook is not the same thing as a “keeping room.” A good friend of mine just bought a gorgeous house in East Rome; she showed my family and me the exterior, and then my son and I went back (at her suggestion) to “tour” the interior during the Estate Sale there recently—that’s when I saw her lovely “keeping room” with a black marble fireplace. Wisegeek’s definition suggests to me that a keeping room is where Paul Revere would have likely slept before dashing out to raise the alarm in the chilliness of a Boston April in 1775.

But I digress.

I knew from the sepia tint of this originally white Hormel Chili coupon that it was aged, and I was intrigued by its lodging as a bookmark in a slender book of poetry by Pablo Neruda. So I looked for an expiration date and read in a mustard-colored rectangular box between “40¢” and “40¢”: “MANUFACTURER COUPON / EXPIRES 4/30/93.”

My husband asked me later when he found the coupon on the island in our kitchen: “What were we doing in 1993?” I couldn’t remember geographical specifics immediately (What city? What jobs? What university?). It was the third year of our marriage, before children, and all I know for sure is that we were loving each other.

Then I remembered he was slogging his way through a very demanding MBA at The University of Texas at Austin while I worked my fingers to the marrow at a Medicaid insurance company. Remembering all that, I knew for certain that we were living then in a very small apartment and eating more-than-are-recommended quick meals such as Hormel Chili and Tuna-Fish Helper.

That’s why I found the coupon so intriguing. It’s so friable and dated and small. I love it for being so impermanent. Its top and right edges are straight, untouched by scissors or hands (showing that this coupon must’ve been at the top right of some magazine page), while its left and bottom edges show where I was too lazy or too tired to get up and find the scissors, choosing instead to use my human hands to carefully but not exactly neatly tear it out of the magazine. I also thought to myself: With not uncommon absent-mindedness, I’ve found this coupon-bookmark in a book seventeen years too late.

Then there is the coupon’s expired but still energetic offer of money-off to entice me to make a purchase that I obviously hankered to make when I was thirty-two. But that’s as old news as a nearly extinct font now. I mean that the offer is so old that when I wanted to type the cent sign into this blog’s title, I found that not only is that currency symbol no longer found on a computer keyboard but also that it was never there.

I have since quietly accepted that a cent sign is something I remember only from typewriter days. Things cost too much these days for a cent symbol to require a spot on a computer’s QWERTY. Once upon a time, 1/100th of a dollar (from the Latin centum for “hundred”) was a very prized copper penny. I spent several minutes searching the Internet until I found a “¢” I could use here.

But I wheeze like a crone as I watch cent signs, typewriters, pennies, and Hormel Chili coupons slip from my short-as-the-lifecycle-of-grass grasp.

The point of this winding, long-winded blog is that lately I have been profoundly thankful on a daily (secondly) basis for my husband and children and for old friends and new, who put up with, gently point out, kindly ignore, and even sometimes enjoy (by which I mean “make fun of”) my predilection for a long-winded, digressive, absent-minded, long-worded, and (see earlier blog, please) directionally challenged way of living. With many of them, I even feel comfortable enough to be my very quiet self.

I’ve always been thankful for those who love me and who let me love them, but recently I have been especially down-on-my-knees-and-singing-of-heart about them and the joy and laughter we share every wonderfully routine day and even in the middle of what looks like disaster, sometimes. The kindness of others is the often-overlooked oxygen in which we live out our days, and when we have skyfulls of it, we sometimes even forget that we’re breathing such graced air.

The other point of this winding, long-winded blog with its expired, useless 40¢ coupon (a symbol to an English major of a world sometimes bent on profit-making and on rushing beautiful essentials like cooking-and-eating together) is that that ancient, yellowing coupon fell out of a book of Pablo Neruda’s eternal poetry. The poem is “Tu Risa,” and I had Hormel-Chili-marked this page, where the poem goes like this:

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

. . .

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

I don’t know why I was so stopped in my sandals by a Hormel Chili coupon sandwiched between pages of love poems. Maybe it was the fleeting nature of the chili coupon versus (or “verses”) that which endures through a grueling MBA degree together, through living in the most cramped apartment in Austin, and through desperately trying to learn how to earn the rent for that cramped apartment by answering the phone and quickly giving medical providers the correct complex ICD-9 codes, all for $14,000 a year (that’s including countless hours of overtime a week).

The comparison is kind of like a swimming pool versus the ocean or a robot versus a squirming baby or a stock portfolio versus a genuine hug from a close friend or a plastic tulip versus one rooted in the ground with its shining pink petals wet with dew.

Madeleine L’Engle quotes the American poet Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) when she writes in Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage:

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.

I would also add (because I still love junk food):

And Hormel Chili that I scooped up with a dented fork as we ate together was more than Hormel Chili.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 27th, 2010 at 12:57 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.