Melanie and the Juice Machine

Like Melanie was an accomplished lover, she was also an accomplished cook. She was a recluse and often reiterated if she had a choice, she would live on a desert island alone and read books. Through her schizophrenia that also connected with the idea of “going back to school.” In her mind it was almost figurative, because I am not sure she understood the term “going back to school” simply meant working on a Master’s degree. Because she felt stranded in her everyday life working for the Anti Defamation League and editing a month rag in Columbus, Ohio, the prospect of “going back to school” meant some kind of escape. Her other prison was the man that she worked for on their monthly arts publication wanted to marry her. The only drawback to that was he was almost eighty years old, and she was only forty-four. She felt strongly his selfishness at wanting to acquire a wife outweighed the reality of him being able to take care of her. What does an eighty year old man have to offer a younger woman? Children? Money? A Stable Home? He could offer none of these, but he did offer love. That love she found out was in the spiritual realm, because age also takes it toll on one’s effectiveness in bed. It was a tangled web, but she did her best to keep disconnected from it. It wasn’t easy, when someone was preying on your emotions. In spite of all these complications we hit it off and started living together. Our first night together, or maybe second, I cooked for her. I have a special recipe I learned from another D.M.A student at Ohio State. Todd Marvey cooked Italian sausage, mushrooms, zucchini squash, and sweet onion and put them over a bed of fettuccini. I liked to blacken the sausage, which she insisted was carcinogenic. She did remark that it was a tasty meal and ate it. Melanie was rather set in her food habits, as anyone with intelligence should be. “You are what you eat.” Behold the day she bought the immortal “grill pan.” This ingenious device was a ribbed grill that sat on top of the burners on the stove. Now it became possible to “grill” vegetables producing an aesthetically pleasing brownish hue, especially on the zucchini. I was a proponent of the “stir fry.” I had learned this a few years earlier, and in my quest for good nutrition this and the “wok” became indispensable for providing healthy nutrition for this bachelor. The “grill pan” was the holy grail for Melanie, that along with the “juicer.” The juicer appeared along with the need for an immense variety of fresh vegetables. We were all ready buying food from Wild Oats, the local organic grocery store. It was an easy departure to add a few more vegetables for use in the juice machine. We tried various concoctions of mixed vegetables, and she forced me to drink them. Personally I felt no better after drinking the healthy cold porridge, but I did it because she asked me. I was an avid supporter of the barley grass supplement, because it had protein. That and the other seaweed stew that was advertised on television. We alternated cooking, but ultimately she ended up, as the woman should, making what she wanted. I was willing to go along with her choices, because they were healthy. One of Melanie’s specialties was “snacks.” Snacks was a component of romance where with the realization you would be making love later, you got to eat aphrodisiac-type foods that were pleasing to the palate. There were various combinations of cheeses, crackers, jams, fruits, and fruity drinks. Even on occasion a beer would be had to help ease her into the mood. There was one particular cassette tape she liked by a recently emerging jazz pianist that had notable ECM-like influences. Like Keith Jarrett it was romantic in nature and provided the perfect backdrop for our lovemaking later. As one other Masters student at OSU said, “If you can’t eat well, it is not worth being alive.”