Whilst thumbing through the old testament looking for a meaning to this life after having lost my favorite recipe, for Amish friendship bread, I came upon an old grocery list that contained the following items: eggs, dish soap, string, sealing wax…what had I intended to make?
Not sure of any answers, I thought about the last time I used the recipe in hopes of conjuring a flour-coated ghost of milk and sugars in proper proportions. Ahnied Nack-Wwak! The last time I made it was for Ahnied.
The half Hindu half Inuit downstairs neighbor of mine that moved in below my fine abode last year. Ah, a well illustrated character. A confident yet frail beast with crossed eyes, Crohn's disease and an aptness for savory pies. Mushroom, spinach and green olive. Meatball with Fontina. Rosemary potato with sun dried tomato. A gift for well contrived combinations of fanciful flavors. She just had a knack for it.
We met at the door, as so many meetings, beginnings and endings, greetings and departings often occur. So it was with Ahnied and me. She moved in a week to the day from the previous tenants departure. He was a vile creature with more creature habits than human. He was the cellar dweller extraordinaire in every misinterpreted sense of the idea. I laid up many a night hypothesizing and conspiring with my cat against him. We never came to any plan or conclusion in time. It seems, all the while he was well on the road to having himself deported from the universe, by way of heavily burdened veins. The cat knew it all along and never let on. He is both wise and deceiving.
I was exiting the main entry door to our building for the purpose of erranding with high hopes for good produce at the outdoor market, for my cravings for cabbages have grown of late. Ahnied, herself was just arriving and in her arms she carried a box of curious cookware. We glanced in similar interest before continuing in no particular motion. That evening when I got home I decided to begin the weeklong process of forming a complexly proportionary basic tasting baked good for which to be broken with the new character resting just below my feet. I needed to, or so I felt.
A week to the day after her arrival I knocked on her door, loaf in hand not sure what or who to expect and a morbid curiosity in the pit of my stomach about the inside of this dwelling previously inhabited by a hound of hell. She answered the door cautiously but with some dramatics as she thrust her right foot forward into the opening crevice to prevent the escape of her own curios pet. “May I help you?” she inquired. “Just saying hello with week old bread,” I announced proudly. After explaining thoroughly that I had meant to imply that I painstakingly fulfilled a need for baking an ancestral recipe used to evoke feelings of welcoming and not indeed baked a deadly loaf that I aged into a yeasty moldy toxin in order to send her slowly to death with little to no trace of an ergot laced flour, she invited me in with a casual ”ok.”
We gelled quite fast and easily like and instant pudding with half the milk. She ate the bread in fistfuls while forcing bits of leftover pies upon me by the plateful. At some point in our discovery of one another we agreed we were both adamant in our distaste for tarts. She was a beatific baker and a spellbinding storyteller and we spent many hours entertaining one another with well-spoken words of nonsense interspersed with autobiographical oddities. One such story was part tall tale, part romance novel and ended at her birth. The following is the retelling of her parents meeting and her conception as told to me, by her, after carb-bingeing and wine wasting.
Nick Nack was a compassionate daydreamer and failed poet. Actually to call him a failed poet would be to discount the numerous other things at which he failed. (To quote a brainless, beauteous youth) such as, like, bussing tables, reshelving books in the library, driving a bus on a repeated and timely route, sorting mail, monitoring security cameras from a small booth and most recently selling vacuum cleaners via a late night-early morning infomercial add and phone campaign. Yes, compassionate failure indeed. While trying his hand as the partner in another doomed to failure venture selling men’s toiletry products thru a poorly constructed catalog something like Avon meets dc comics, he met Paddy, his soul mate. When I say trying his hand I mean to say generously applying the sample products to himself in the corner washateria while waiting for his only suit to finish spinning and spitting out laundry related haikus to the deaf 90 year laundry attendant.
“Spinning round and round
I pray my socks stay well paired
for I have so few.”
“Powdered soap is coarse
but liquid soap cost much more
what worries have I”
“Do not hit machines
The multi-colored sign reads
But it ate my coin!”
The ridiculousness may have gone on forever if Paddy hadn’t laughed out loud. Paddy Wwak was a Nepalese Hindu studying the art of cuisine at the CIA. She afforded personal items and necessities by doing the occasional odd job “under the table.” Fellow students taught her this valuable survival tool since the loans and scholarships she had earned paid little more than her classes and minimal meals. On this particular day she was laundering the unmentionables of the entire household in order to afford a more usable set of knives, when she was distracted by the musings of a nearly nude male coated in abundant musk’s. This was a match made somewhere in the bowels of New York City between the wash and dry steps to clean underwear. A year later was bore Ahnied. Ahnied Nack-Wwak.
I will end this tale for now. Until the next installment, I am Justin Thyme and that is the first of Ahnied.
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relaxed
amused 
optimistic 
dorky 
. I had been dropped at the designated entry point by my two favorite brown, Muslim-American compadres who are quite full of discontent toward national security aimed at "Quaran -carrying terrorists,"types - we all know that non-white folks are bad. I was sure to call them from my seat across from my departure gate after having received my boarding pass and sailed through security-a whole of 10 minutes-to add to their disgust of the process as they themselves had not fully left the airport loop.
," themed journal tome. All dedicated writers of ridiculous non-sense should carry appropriate recording books.
minus 
. (and we all know this is the same as two packs of dry roasted peanuts minus a tomato juice plus lime to the second power of ice.)