Like Butter

Yesterday was a monumental day in the life of Erica Orloff. I learned how to use my rice steamer.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I only learned to use the coffeemaker last year. I used to buy McDonald's coffees--extra large--six at a time, and then microwave them as needed. I owned a coffeemaker, but the contraption overwhelmed me. So, I have had the "Rolls Royce" of rice steamers, a gift when I went macrobiotic over a year ago . . . but always had to ask Significant Other (the giver of the gift) to make my rice. Turns out all you have to do is put two cups of water to one cup of rice. Close the steamer. Press the white rice or brown rice button. And wait. That's it. Voila! Rice! As a macrobiotic eater (most of the time), rice is a staple, and so I am delighted. But Baby Son has had medical issues and was diagnosed with "Failure to Thrive" meaning my baby couldn't gain weight if he tried. And trust me, we stuffed him. So . . . he is on a high-fat diet thanks to the doctors at Children's Hospital--and high fat is the exact opposite of macrobiotic. So he gets butter on his rice. Trust me, I'm going somewhere with this.

Adding butter yesterday, I was at the last of a stick, and was using the waxed paper to spread it on Baby Demon Boy's rice. Because I am "cooking challenged," the P.C. version of I can't cook at all, I ended up with butter all over my hands. (And if you have somehow concluded that smearing butter on steamed rice isn't really "cooking," then clearly you are not as "cooking challenged" as I am.) So I went to rinse off my hands. Butter is not easy to get off your hands, and it felt like I was slathered in thick moisturizer, and I was suddenly carried away to a book. To the MOMENT I read it.

I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale 22 years ago. The details of it remain vivid. I can't tell you, for sure, the names of all the characters, but the real details remain. Deprived of anything to enhance beauty, the captive Handmaid saves little bits of butter from her meals, secreting it away in her spare pair of shoes, to use as moisturizer on her dry hands. That little detail, and how her hands ached for the butter . . . felt so tragic in the confines of the novel. Twenty-two years later, it remains part of me to such an extent that I don't even look at a simple item like butter in the same way.

The best of books will do that. Plot details will fall away, character names will fade. But the best of books will have a moment of heart-wrenching pain, or a moment of pure undistilled joy--defined not by the words of emotion but the small details--and will remain. Those moments when real book lovers will say, "I'll never forget . . ."

So, do you have an "I'll never forget . . . " moment from a book? A movie? In your own work in progress . . . a moment you are aiming for?