JOIN USWhen I was young enough to be easily bribed by life to be happy, I was hooked by the 1000 island dressing in a tasty salad in America. I began to describe every awesome kind of joy arriving as the 1000 island dressing. And then, even the smallest triumphs over adversity or bullying or any bad behaviour not to be tolerated, became a sip out of that salad dressing and got written up in my sky blue diary.
Now I seek this healthy and comforting dish when I’m clobbered by one of life’s bullying, burst open times of loss and less and even lesser! I made one bowl of it the other day in two BMTC buses when both the conductor and the driver in a Pushpak bus gave me extra change to deprive me of my ticket. I stood up to the rudeness and the bullying and got my tickets and ate up my salad. It was as if Puccini’s heavenly music was pampering my ears.
I also taste this salad which seems to be a combination of crisp cauliflower, fresh green peas, fat potatoes, corn and assertive green palak when I firmly deal with vampirism posing as friendship in my personal affairs. But it comes out of the micro wave of living less often when I can convince my cats to make up their minds about coming in or going out of the door instead of dilly dallying like I do with solving my most pressing problems, being too meek or lazy. It seems to me that the problem unsolved, is more interesting and often spawns a poem or a story which seems richer than the loss I am enduring!
Luckily this permanent dressing can be cooked up with the smallest of ingredients such as picking up the 10 or 12 or even 20 fallen cuttings of the portulaca plant in my favourite nursery, which are always lying there waiting to be collected honestly and innocently and safely, (since no one will arrest you) to be turned into six new pots for free.
Portulaca planting is like refurbishing a rose without expertise — this baby rose never demands expertise or dreadful competition — my kind of flower! And life’s most enthralling moments are made up of small helpings which add up to a 1000 and more blessings and the recipe is home made and inside us. Often under the grime and around the gruesome trolls that lumber over us and even growl! When the non-essentials and the trolls have been packed off or scraped off, this salad of sense and sensibility cooks itself into the most awesome and addictive treat!