Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic (Recipe Not Included.)

Say you find a recipe called Roast Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic. The instructions read"throw everything in a slow cooker and wait four hours," snd say that the garlic cloves turn out  really really good - particularly smeared across a fresh sliced French baguette.  And say that after you’ve dreamily chewed your way through half a loaf, your husband yelps and says "Hey! I've only had two cloves!" and you look down and discover that you've eaten the other 38.

Hypothetically speaking.

That night, you just might just find yourself sleeping by yourself on the living room sofa. For health and safety reasons. 

It's just like French onion soup. Only louder.

Memories Don't Keep You Warm Enough.

The neighborhood around the Los Leones Metro station in Providencia is full of second hand and vintage clothing shops. They bring stock down from North America and the neighborhood is  a godsend for those of us with rangy gringo builds that don't fit lines designed for the rather more petite Chilean figure.
            Right now, that's me.  I left my leather winter jacket in a taxi and I'm looking for a new one.
            There are a lot of really lovely leather jackets in Chile - but I'm tall, and broad across the shoulders, and if the jacket doesn't fit so tight across the back that I can't lift my arms, the waist doesn't drop below my bellybutton, and the zipper won't meet across my chest, and when I ask hopefully for a larger size, I'm already wearing XL and the line doesn't go any higher.
            Yesterday I went to Los Leones.  I started in a store called Vintage, just off of Calle Santa Magdalena, and deep in a rack of high-eighties leather (bat-wing sleeves, malignant shoulder pads, vented fronts, elasticated waists, studs, fringe, patchwork and brocade - and every benighted bit of it on each and every jacket) I hit the jackpot.  On my very first stop.
            You could practically hear bells ringing.  Because this was it.
            This was really it - a soft suede duster, with a flared collar, and a gentle drape to the long skirt and wide split cuffs that ran almost all the way up to my elbows.
            It was the sort of coat that Destiny's Child would have rocked if they'd dreamed that high.  My college-aged self would have given a half a point off of my GPA for a coat like this.  The Dixie Chicks would probably have thrown in a solid gold record.
            It didn't  fit me like a glove.  It fit like a memory, like a song, you know -  the one where you copied the lyrics into a notebook because they got you - got you in a way nothing else ever had before.  They laid it all out like it was, and told you who you were in a way you'd always almost known, but had never quite understood until you heard that song - 
            That's how that coat fit.
I stood in front of the mirror and admired, and I turned one way, and then I turned the other, and then I turned back the first way again  -
            and I suppose one day I will be grateful to the big burly fellow with the Harley Davidson beard who was put his hand on my shoulder and said, very gently, "No. This is not a winter coat. This is not 2003.  You are not buying that coat today."  


It could have been. It could have been 2003.  Because I have dreams.

Doors and Holes

Mr Tabubil is feeling peevish. That 8.3 earthquake last September knocked our front door out of skew. and we now have a one centimeter gap between the bottom of the door and the floor.  It's not much gap, but in cold weather it leaks heat like a broken sieve, and whenever there's a wind, the draft hits the far side of the apartment with a speed that makes one ponder more exotic aspects of physics and meteorology.  It's probably something quantum.*
            Mr Tabubil has bought a rubber weather strip to cover the gap. 
We didn't get one last winter, because most of the city was in our position, and there was a run on the hardware stores and by the time everything was back in stock, the weather was warm.
            This evening he took the door off its hinges, screwed on the brass plate of the weather strip, and spent three quarters of an hour fussing and straining and worrying and fiddling and putting a hold in his hand and hammering and crimping and bashing and pulling to get the un-skewed door back on its hinges.  Turns out a lot of things were out of skew.
            And then he closed the door - and the rubber bit of the weather strip, quite unceremoniously, peeled off.

Ow.

Right now he is browsing the websites of the major hardware chains with the request to be left alone please, and, at intervals, huffing hugely.

*(Sir Pterry - respect.)

The Flat Roof of the Shed

It is still winter, and the air is still grotty, and curling up with a book and being somewhere else still feels like Very Good Idea. Back in June, I wrote about Surf Sounds - a book of poetry by the Australia poet Roger Higgins. Surf Sounds is full of somewhere-elses.  This one is a memory.


The Flat Roof of the Shed. 

As a boy he would lie on his back
spread-eagled over the corrugated iron
on the flat roof of the shed.
He would look for familiar faces in the clouds,
his second grade teacher as she tried and failed
and tried again to make him a right-hander
leaning over his shoulder to gently take the pencil
from one hand and place it in the other,
and the long unshaven face of his grandfather
who kept a high gloss on the old green chevy
and sometimes let him ride in the rumble seat.
The boy would anticipate whether the next arrow head
would drag a contrail in from the north or south
turning the sky on a clear day
into an ancients’ map of the world with places
that were just names to him around the rim
and himself in the centre.
He did not feel the metal ridges
under his shoulder blades and buttocks
and easily filled in those aimless hours
between school and the family dinner
climbing down at the last minute to do his chores
chopping and bringing in wood for the combustion stove
or picking fresh corn and carrots from the garden.


Surf Sounds: Poems by Roger Higgins

Roger Higgins' poetry is both day by day and exotic. The poet washes his socks and jocks when he showers. He prefers description, narrative and irony to self-dramatization; there’s a lot more to Surf Sounds than ocean, beach and desert.
~ Graham Rowlands, Poet

Surf Sounds can be purchased through Liquid light Press , amazon, and Lulu.

Roger Higgins has been published in various magazines and journals.  He is an Australian who has traveled widely and lived in (alphabetically) Canada, Chile, Papua New Guinea, Scotland, and the USA.  Roger is an engineer by vocation, and has utilized his pen rather more than his camera on many of his travels, bringing together his physical and emotional responses to the environments and situations which he has encountered.  First collection Hieroglyphs, Friendly Street Poets 2008. Most recent collection Surf Sounds, Liquid Light Press 2014.