SOS

I like to think I am as mindful as anybody out there, but of course I don't like to think I am old enough to forget things, a lot of things. Especially things that might be cooking on my stove. Frankly, I'm proud to say I finally got so mindful that I'm not mindful of eggs boiling, I now carry around a timer while they are. There's nothing like a clicking plastic chicken to remind you eggs are in hot water.

I didn't do that for the rhubarb. Probably because I was sitting at the dining table not far away, reading the newspaper on my i Pad. Probably because I usually put stewing fruit on a very very low flame and expect the process to be long. Probably because I forgot when I leave the kitchen physically, I forget I'm cooking something. Even when I promise myself I'm not going to forget. Remember, I'm mindful.

"Somebody must be barbequing," flickered through my thoughts after a smoky odor wafted into my nostrils. I went right on sipping tea and reading. I love reading the Sunday New York Times on Saturday night, so I treat myself. It's a lot to read.

Eventually I got up, walked toward the stove and lifted the lid off the rhubarb. !?!?!?!?!?!?****??!!!!!!!!!!  Who'd put the flame on high like that? Who stewed my rhubarb in nanoseconds? The white enamel sides and bottom of the cast iron Le Creuset, my favorite reach for perfect size pot, were crunchy black. Deep, dark crunchy black. Screwed rhubarb. A hopeless burn victim. 

I stared at the deathly blackness in my favorite reach-for pot. Ruined just like that. By rhubarb.  Stupid rhubarb I didn't really need and never should have bought. But it was the end of the season for it and I am a pig for fresh local whatever. Shi...i..taki. Was this a lesson or what?

Most women would have shrugged and thrown that hot pot in the trash. Really, who has time to bother trying to scrap burnt crust off the entirety of an enamel sauce pan? We live in the age of New, new new. And a burnt pot is a great excuse to exercise the right to shop for that.

But I'm a stubborn old bird, financially challenged, and quite experienced, I'm sorry to say, at scraping and scrubbing the burn off a pot. Especially if it's an old favorite, too old to have been made in China, so made to last. I went at it, with brio, the energy of vengeance. I got the rhubarb scraped out, most of it anyway, and began the vinegar boil. A sangha sister once rescued a burnt pot of mine by showing me how vinegar helps eat off the crust. It didn't do much this time. The white enamel was still pretty much entirely black. Third degree burns.

I moved on to the Ajax boil, with the fan on high, and this helped to loosen a bit off the bottom. So I soaked the pot overnight in more Ajax. 

In the morning light, it was still seriously, depressingly black. But I wasn't going to give up. Not mindful me. I got out a new pad of SOS and applied my might to scrubbing. What a painfully arduous chore. "You must be a screaming idiot," I told myself, "to think you can clean a pot this far burnt. Just throw it away already." But no, I defiantly kept scrubbing, into my second pad of SOS and lost fingernails.

I'm convinced of course that the current SOS is not the old SOS I remember. It's evidently been New and Improved when I wasn't looking because it's soft and weak. I really don't care about lemon scent: I want stiffness, coarseness, scratchiness when you need it.  But the pad didn't have enough oomph to do more than dislodge teeny little shards of black I'd already loosened with a pastry scraper.

Still, seeing how I was getting some of it off I kept going. I wanted victory, a perfect pot. I took to the pastry scraper again and again. I left the pot soak and came back later in the day.

I had done my second vinegar boil, my umpteenth mental fuming, and fourth SOS pad when I realized scrubbing this stupid pot was a whole lot like scrubbing my mind with Dharma. Really. That white enamel underneath the burnt offering was still there pure as the day it left the French factory, and I was trying to get back to it just the way I struggle in Buddhist practice to get back to the pure mind under all my thoughts, emotions and experiences. I was trying to clean pot the way I'm constantly trying to clear away my obscurations and what the Dharma calls the "adventitious stains" of experience. I'd read enough in the New York Times to realize burnt pot "heads" are running/ruining the world.

 The job sucked but I kept scrubbing... .



~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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