With Gusto

Why am I spearing these green leaves with my fork, stuffing them into my mouth? I'm eating with gusto. It's not the gusto of joy but of a kind of desperation. Desperation for my vegetables? To get this food finished? To have eaten rather than to eat?

A week ago I was dancing at my college reunion. I rushed to Providence, missed dinner but not the drinks and the stuffed mushroom caps in the freezing tent outside. After a beer and a mushroom I went into Sayles Hall, the place where I'd seen Jessie Jackson speak in the 1980s -- I remember internalizing the cadence of his voice as much as the content of his speech, so that by the end I was carried into such a frenzy that I almost didn't know what happened except in the realization that something had happened. Dancing more than two decades later in this same hall transmuted me, too. It wasn't so much the rhythm of the music, though it was that, too. It was partly the scotch that I drank with my friend Sue in honor of our dead mentor. It was at his memorial service -- held, I think, in this same hall -- that I decided, finally, to go to graduate school. I'd been toying with the idea, and then all of a sudden I knew. So it was an impulsive decision borne of years of indecision.

I mixed my drink with other kinds of sugar. The first tray a server brought round was lined with tiny chocolate mousse cakes. I took one that looked like it had a hint of orange (it reminded me of a delicacy called Amélie, sold at Pix, a Portland patisserie that used to be around the block from my brother's house). I didn't taste any orange -- it was just a dense pure moussey chocolate, the thickness of cream without any air to lighten it. I would have preferred to eat just half of it, but I didn't know what to do with the rest (it was so pretty and so delicious that it seemed like it would be rude to forsake it). So I ate it for the sake of eating, not unlike my frantic spearing of greens today. Next came by a tray of bon-bons: small chocolate balls filled -- I checked with the server first -- with ice cream. These were generously sized treats. In another circumstance I might have better appreciated the thickness of the shell, a solid wall of dark chocolate surrounding vanilla ice cream. But all I really wanted was to taste and feel the iciness of the cream in my mouth. As I finished mine, I wondered if there were more to come.

Instead of waiting for more, Sue and I headed to the dance floor for this Funk Night reunion. Dancing was so easy -- it was dark and I kept drinking and, for a while, I didn't care if I had a "partner." I wondered why I didn't go to Funk Night every weekend when I was in college and thought maybe my life would have turned out much better if I had. I could have been like the other college girls, meeting all the boys I would never have the chance to get to know now, setting up prospects for my future. I danced for nearly three hours. I didn't want to stop, except that I knew I had to be up early for the graduation at the college where I now teach. I had parked a block from where I used to live at Brook and John, so my walk to my car was the walk I'd taken night after night when I was in school -- through the Green, across the fraternity quad and past the Ratty, down Thayer, up to Brook and over to Williams -- but it didn't even occur to me to feel like myself of those days.

I'm not sure what I feel like these days either. Yesterday I ate a noodle salad so quickly that by the end I thought I might be sick. Where did that speed come from? What need is it chasing?