Where to start?

When I last posted, I was battling ants in a red-clay village with only a hint of what lay ahead. My plan, as sketchy as it was, would have me head north and take a right into Vietnam. Well, in short, I never took that right. The times that followed were of absolute bliss and thoughts and words and lessons flowed through and around me like a long overdue bath of life. I regret that I have not shared those epiphanies here as they came to me and I struggle with a question; I ask myself, ‘How do I provide continuum or at least some coverage of the past 6 months, if I failed to post regularly?” or in more simple terms, “Where do I start?”

Before dealing with the June to December subject, let me first tell a story. I call this story “Where to Start?”

Sometime between university and career, I had a job as a pie baker for a gourmet ice cream store in Brooklyn. The process for making the pies was very simple. For each pie, use two frozen pie shells. Put filling in one, leave the other empty. Put a tray of empty shells and a tray of full shells in the convection oven for a few minutes then take them out. Place an empty pie shell over a full pie shell, pop off the top aluminum foil and then pinch the edges of the top and bottom shell together to give it a homemade look. Return the pies to the oven to bake. You see, this is a very simple process to produce a dozen or so pies in 45 minutes.

One day, I was baking pies when a parade of about 65 Jehovah’s Witnesses came in to each order a single scoop of vanilla ice cream in a sugar cone. This was not an unusual event at the ice cream shop. They were good customers, always polite and orderly and nearly always exact change, however it was a huge amount of work which the one person working the front of the store could not handle alone.

I had just taken the pie shells from the oven and flipped them all and was ready to pinch two trays of pies when the counter girl (in the industry known as “the scooper”) asked me to help out with the onslaught of customers. So I turned to Carl, a bit of an idiot savant but a great ice cream maker, and asked him to pinch the pies while I helped out the scooper. Then I dove into the strenuous process of scooping endless vanilla ice cream cones.

In between cones, I happened to look back into the kitchen and saw Carl hovering over the two trays of pies, his fingers poised to pinch at his chest level. He was not pinching, only hovering. Odd, I thought and dove back into the case to scoop another cone. Handing the cone over the counter to the delighted mendicant, I looked back to the kitchen again; still hovering, still not pinching. I put my scoop in the water and walked back to the kitchen.

“Hey, Carl,” I asked him, the pie shells cooling in front of him “what’s the problem, Carl?”

Carl squinted back at me, his fingers still in a pre-pinch mid-air posture and motioned to the dozen round pies before him. “I don’t know where to start,” he said, genuinely confused but also astoundingly astute of the conundrum. Carl had seen what I had never noticed. All the pies were circles, there was no beginning point from which to commence pinching and therefore, no pinching could occur.

“Anywhere,” I blurted, aware there was an army of customers still wanting my attention.

“Yes, but where?” he protested and moved his fingers closer to the pies, but still circling directionless like a blind hawk over an ocean of prey.

I knew Carl. I knew this conversation would last for hours if I could not tell him a direct point, so I did what any rational person would do. I put a pinch in a pie to get him started. Any pie. Any degree on the circle. It didn’t matter because where to start is not really important. What is important is that you must, absolutely, start.

That is the story of Where to Start. Now, let’s deal with what happened to June to December. It would ridiculous to postdate all the entries during that time frame, so instead, over the next few days, I will recap what occurred, submit of few of the “gems” that are worth transcribing and then we will be back up to speed on my journey to Samosa. I intend to then be a bit more diligent in documenting what happens from here.