Al Dente
An underdone morsel from Self-Evident: We Hold These Truths
Al Dente1
Don’t those two words just set you to wondering who invented spaghetti? If you think about it—which one must—flat pasta is a no-brainer. All you need is a rolling pin and a knife. You roll some dough out real, real thin, and then you can make fettuccine, or wider stuff like egg noodles, maybe even shells or manicotti (if you’re real, real patient that is.)2 But spaghetti? That had to wait for the invention of an extruding device, like, say, the Torchio Bigolaro Torchio a Mano Macchina per Pasta.3 Yet of all the many, many pasta shapes, that is the eponymous variety. How did it get to be first in line if it was the last invented? Isn’t there a union rule about last-in-first-out?
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Anyway, that’s the kind of thing that woke me up, for real, at 2:30 a.m. today.
But I want to reassure you that this story is going to be done just enough. Toothsome.
Muriel McGillicutty prefers manicotti,4 by the way—the way the sauce gets inside the little sleeves—whereas, in her view, spaghetti is inclined to shed sauce rather than convey.
Enough about pasta, already—basta!
Muriel has a handful just now. She was walking her next- door neighbors’ dog (they’re away for the weekend) when a squirrel dashed across the road. Mr. Dibbs (Dog5, if you’re keeping track) leapt with such muscular enthusiasm that the leash snapped. Off ran the dog in hot pursuit. Now he’s way up in the woods at the base of a tree, barking like he means it. Which, one assumes, he does.
“Mr. Dibbs, you come here!” And so forth, but he’s not having it and, gosh, she’s no spring chicken. The hill is steep and covered with slippery leaves, it being autumn in these parts, and her attempt to scramble toward the canine5 is proving fruitless.
Now she’s on hands and knees, crawling toward her charge. Poor woman. The leaves are wet, her bluejean knees are soaked, her hands are muddy. Mr. Dibbs is racing in circles around the tree, acting like he’s never seen a squirrel before in his life. Still barking.
Just as she finally arrives, the dog dashes back down to the road where he sits, wagging his tail, waiting for Muriel, now slipping and sliding on her butt, also soaked through to.6
I know, I know. I left you wondering where the neighbors went off to.7
Deborah and Felix Strässer decided to spend a long weekend in Charleston, which, if anyone had asked me, is a really, really stupid idea in this time of cholera. Why expose yourself to a deadly infection for no better reason than to “get away from it all”? There are going to be multiple commercial interactions and, oh, yeah, they’ll wear masks and use about a gallon of hand sanitizer, but … and it’s a big but …
Let me put it this way. When you were a wee wad and picked up, oh, say, a toy soldier in a sandbox—we’ll have to get back to the toy soldier thing eventually—and were about to put it in your mouth, what did Mom say?
“You don’t know where that’s been!”
Same goes for all the people Deb and Felix are going to run into at pit stops, the AirBnB, the grocery store if they plan to eat in, or, for God’s8 sake, in a restaurant????? You don’t know where they’ve been, or with whom. All of them.
They’re more likely to “get it” than to “get away.”
But these young people, they think they’re bulletproof.
They’re in their mid-twenties, just a few years past the time that our brains are fully formed according to developmental biological research. Even then it takes some more years before the fully formed unit becomes fully in-formed.9
So they’ll pay their money and take their chances.
“Why?” (I hear you asking.) “Do they have a long weekend in which to take this death-defying journey?”
Let me ponder. Now it seems I have to come up with employment situations that grant them simultaneous four-day weekends. Um. It has to be plausible. (Fingers drumming.)
Oh, why didn’t I think of that before? I mean, today is November 24th … Thanksgiving week! So, this story takes place a few days from now. Let’s say Saturday the 28th which by the time you read this, will be a past Thanksgiving. Works for me.
I realize it would be disconcerting for you to read a story told in the past tense that was actually in the future, sort of sci-fi non? But this is in my future, not yours, and I’m not easily disconcerted.
To spare myself whatever small measure of disconcert, I could have arranged for this to take place last Thanksgiving (2019), but the story would thence have been spoiled because the Trumpidemic didn’t hit until spring of this year. Most of the previous page would have been rendered irrelevant, or at least imaginary. Fictive.
Mama don’t want no fiction in these stories, as the saying goes. Photorealism is key. And no way am I going to squander my time reinventing their trip at this point, disconcerted or no. I put some serious effort into creating that hegira, though that descriptor is inapt, seeing as theirs is a flight into danger versus the opposite.
I guess you get the point that although this is being reported as if it were happening right now: i.e., present tense, it has to actually be in the past, or how would I have found out about it? See what I mean?
While we’re at it I think this would be a good point to put in my “obligatory report” about an interesting experiment of which I read several years ago.10 I think I’ve mentioned this in at least four of my last five books, but looking at sales figures … well, let’s just say that not everyone has read all any of them.
The following is absolutely factual. No crossies.
A researcher employed a group of typists who rattled away on the computer keypads for a number of days.
Now, when we type, as I am doing just now, it is easy to get the impression that the letters on the screen appear instantly. But no, there is an infinitesimal lag, because we’re dealing with circuits and hardware, not to mention software. Microseconds.
Day by day the researcher increased the lag time in tiny increments. The typists just assumed that nothing had changed. But when the software was suddenly switched back to “normal,” every single one of the participants had the very disconcerting impression that letters were appearing on the screen before they hit the keys!
If that doesn’t blow you away, you aren’t paying attention.
What you see isn’t what you get. It isn’t even what you see. It’s what your brain decides to accept as what is seen. And this involves your muscular and nervous system as well. You not only do not know when you see things, you don’t know when you touch them. It’s all mediated by gray matter.
That disconcerts me.
In any event, when I’m writing on my laptop, even if I write about future events, by the time the letters pop up on my display, they are already, actually, in the past. Not a long way, but definitely past. So we’ll just have to pretend that the Strässers are on holiday right now. I mean, otherwise, why would Muriel be walking Mr. Dibbs?
They’re having a great time in Charleston. If they catch the plague and die, well, maybe they’ll think it was worth it—though obviously they won’t think that after the fact.
Muriel, not so much. Oh, she’s a good sport, and she can wash her hands and the jeans, but she does have some sense of pride. She’s really glad she’s close to the house so she can get home before anyone sees her in this disheveled condition.
It’s not as embarrassing as, say, having your friends find out your spouse is a golfer … but still.
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Did you know that Edgar Allan Poe deemed the short story to be the fiction of the future? He felt that modern life had so sped up that people would no longer have time to read novels.
Now, of course, we have online services like Blinkist® whose expert readers condense lengthy books into 15 minute audio synopses. You can “read” War and Peace on the way to the grocery and The Gulag Archipelago on the way home!
Aren’t we lucky?
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Note per footnotes: Substack renumbers when I post, but footnotes sometimes refer to previous super important stuff in the print version, so originals are in [#].
1 [216] Believe we’ve just added Italian: Language #7. National Book Award here we come!
2 [217] Here at the cat ranch we have a pasta machine, stainless steel, with a crank, and settings for various widths … but, I note, all flat versions. Spaghetti? Non un bastone. (Italian again. Sophisticated, or what?)
3 [218] $409.99—hmm. Would have to crank out a whole lot of pasta to make that worth my nickel.
4 [219] Yesterday’s NYT® crossword taught me that manicotti is Italian for sleeve. And here you think I’ve been frittering.
5 [220] For the record, while we do identify the long pointy teeth, correctly, as felines, we still use “canine” in reference to a species.
6 [221] Does it annoy you when idiots end a sentence with a preposition?
7 [222] Ditto.
8 [223] Used here metaphorically. There are no gods.
9 [224] For the record, at three score and ten mine is still pending.
10 [225] Note: Have mended my ways per prepositional positioning.
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