The purple cabbage embodied my father’s wry earthiness, his love of nature and gardening. Plus, an inherent Jewishness given the vegetable’s presence in so many Jap European diasporic dishes.
The cabbage additionally felt aesthetically apt. My father had a spherical halo of curly hair and an identical mustache—a late-Seventies fashion set that he sported my whole life. (Till they shaved his mustache within the ICU, I’d by no means seen his higher lip). If my father’s silhouette had been a vegetable, it will be cruciferous.
Sadly, issues weren’t trying good for the half cabbage in query. I discovered it wilted and moldy, the outer leaves suffering from a black rot. The inside cross part, the place he’d minimize the vegetable in two with a knife, was striated with darkish slime.
Regardless of its poor look I felt compelled to discover a solution to eat a few of this cabbage—even only a chew. I needed to share the vegetable with my father, to pour out a little bit cabbage, if you’ll. If the cabbage was one thing he’d began, I knew that I need to end it. I didn’t essentially imagine that I might preserve my father alive by means of comestible symmetry (I did), however I feared that I might by no means be capable of share one other meal with him (I might not).
And so, I performed surgical procedure on the cabbage. One after the other I eradicated the outer leaves with my fingers. Then I rigorously minimize out the runny blight from the inside part with a knife. I washed the entire head underneath the sink, dried it in on a paper towel, and examined my handiwork. What I discovered was heartening. Beneath the demise and decay there have been nonetheless wholesome, vibrant, juicy layers of vegetable left.
I ripped off a piece of the residing leaves and positioned them in my mouth. The flavour was candy and juicy, scrumptious. It was as if no time had handed since my father had minimize into this vegetable and ate it himself. I laughed as I considered the phrases miracle cabbage, remembering the story of the Hanukkah miracle, the place a small quantity of oil served to mild the menorah within the previous temple for eight nights. For me, nothing might concurrently conjure the ephemerality of natural matter and the eternality of affection—the paradoxical ways in which linear time each issues deeply and in addition under no circumstances—like that previous cabbage.
The next morning I wakened and instantly ate one other chunk. The following day, extra. For 4 days and nights I ingested all the edible components of the cabbage that remained. What had gave the impression to be a pathetic wilted vegetable grew to become a part of a sacred ritual, like taking the wafer or lighting a yahrzeit candle.
Was my cabbage truly a miracle cabbage? Possibly all cabbages are capable of stand the take a look at of time. Possibly each cabbage is a miracle cabbage. Or maybe I used to be simply determined and mawkish sufficient to understand that one as magic.
To me, the mental actuality of the ritual issues far lower than the experiential actuality. It’s the similar approach that God is one thing I do know with my coronary heart fairly than with my thoughts. It’s the approach I carry my father’s spirit, despite the fact that he’s bodily gone.
Melissa Broder is the writer of three novels: Dying Valley, Milk Fed, and The Pisces; the essay assortment So Unhappy At the moment; and 5 poetry collections.
