A Farewell to Okra

A Farewell to Okra

By Robin Ford Wallace

            December!  And here we are, stuck inside, brooding about the big issues:  Life.  Death.  Okra.

T.S. Eliot said that April was the cruelest month but what did he know?  He always struck me as a mouth breather.  An American who moved to England so he could live under a monarchy – hello?  One wonders how he felt about disco, or hemorrhoids.  Politics these days send me skittering back to bed to dive fetally under the quilts but at least in America we don’t take orders from hereditary inbred halfwits.  We elect our inbred halfwits, thank you very much.

Anyway, for cruelty April’s not a patch on this time of year.  The  horror starts around Halloween.  There you are trying to get used to the shorter days and longer nights when the end of Daylight Savings pulls the plug and the world turns into a Russian novel.   One minute you’re cheerfully swilling beer among the sun-drenched petunias, the next you’re sentenced to Siberia for plotting to overthrow the tsar.  

But weren’t we talking about okra? 

I have always found okra a frustrating vegetable.  When I first took up gardening my father recommended it as a reliable cash crop.  I expect it was just something he’d read somewhere but it struck me as an odd thing to say.  I’d never had any delusions about gardening as a paying proposition.  Or anything else I did, for that matter – frankly, you don’t go into writing if you’re after the big bucks. 

But anyway, what did my old man know nothing about crops?  Much less cash!  He had a solid middle-class income but he spent it all on whiskey and trashy women, and when he died it was in a rented house moments away from eviction, amid envelopes marked Final Notice and salvos of collection calls. 

My father ignored the collectors and passed serenely into death leaving them all unsatisfied, thereby proving the corollary to you-can’t-take-it-with-you, which is that they can’t get it out of you, either.  I spent the days after his death writing not thank-you notes for condolences but Go Fish letters to his creditors, or calling to ask if they wanted stuff back. 

             Mostly they didn’t.  It may interest you to know that banks may repo a house or a car but that nobody wants the refrigerator you haven’t paid for.  Little of what we ruin ourselves to get retains much value, apparently, once we get it home, so in the long run you might as well squander your money on whiskey as anything else.    

Ahem:  Okra.

Okra is delicious fried, but what isn’t?  Dredge a pencil eraser in seasoned flour, fry it in oil and it will probably taste good enough for company.  (This might even work with sweet potatoes though I guarantee nothing.)

But once at a restaurant I tried ordering unfried okra, stewed with tomatoes, and when the waitress served it up it looked as if she had disemboweled somebody in the kitchen and brought me his quivering guts.  Okra has this mega-mucus inside that commences coagulating all matter around it the minute you slit the pod.  The only antidote is to drop it in boiling oil. 

Me personally, I don’t drop anything in boiling oil.  I have a highly developed sense of sin and I’m pretty sure if I fried anything I’d be struck dead right there at the stove by Rotunda, the patron saint of fat girls.

So I never grew okra, and ate it only at restaurants, shiftily, until a few years back I learned how good it was pickled.  Preserved in vinegar, okra is crisp not slimy, crunchy without the fat grams.  What’s not to like?  So for the first time I planted some – only to be frustrated again.

You can’t pick the pods off the plants!  You have to cut them off, which means you must either remember to take a knife with you to the garden or keep one there and remember not to carry it back.    What earthly human could accomplish that?  Not I – or at least not until the okra pods had grown to the size and texture of baseball bats. 

           Thus I gave it up in disgust and so matters stood until Trenton started its farmers market this year. 
One Saturday when I popped in there wasn’t much left but okra so I bought some to support the home team.  Anyway, I was curious about a recipe where you baked okra in the oven so it would taste like fried but without increasing a person’s specific gravity.

            But you had to cut it up first, and there’s the rub!  Remember that mega-mucus?  With each slice the knife released new reservoirs of it and my fingers trailed ropes of snot as I cut.  It was like cooking up a mess of slugs.

            At my father’s memorial service a friend of his who had given him a nice eulogy, talking about the fun they’d had together over the decades, told me, “Of course I knew your brothers but I had known your father many years before I realized he had daughters.”

            I’ve been thinking about it ever since and it’s made me a bit more sympathetic to those institutions foolish enough to extend the old scoundrel credit.  Perhaps he died without coughing up something I wanted from him, too.

            I won’t get it now. 

            It’s closure of a kind.  The bitterness of the past doesn’t matter anymore, any more than the refrigerator he didn’t pay for or the fact I’m never going to make much money.  This fleeting life!  Who knows what it means? 

But one thing is certain:  I’ll waste no more of it on okra.  In pace requiescat!  

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.