[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

The Frying Pan

Whenever I use my 12-inch stainless steel heavy-bottomed  frying pan 
to saute something over a gas flame, the pan ends up with a deposit 
of burned-on cooking oil around the sides, a ring of dark brown 
freckles. While housekeeping is not my favourite occupation, I do 
like to keep my stainless steel cookware bright -- just one of those 
things. So when it comes time to wash up, I get out the scrubbing 
stuff and dampen a dishrag and put some elbow grease into taking 
those freckles off.

I made a mistake, a year or so ago: I had a self-cleaning gas oven 
that needed to blast out its inner gunk, and this frying pan had a 
serious case of the cooking-oil freckles, so I thought I'd kill two 
birds with one stone. I put the pan in the oven and set the oven for 
self-clean and went to bed. Next morning, when all had cooled down, I 
took the cleaned-off pan out of the blasted-out oven and remembered 
what I should have remembered before I'd taken the lazy way out: 
intense heat discolours stainless steel. My lovely silvery frying 
pan, best beloved among cookware, was now a mass of bronze and 
blueish blotches, like bruises. And no, these weren't going to go 
away, scrub as hard as I might.

I felt almost (but not quite) the way I'd felt when I hit an 
unavoidable squirrel in the road: how could I have *done* this? It 
wasn't a matter of wrong-doing, only of stupidity, but the fact was 
that I'd ruined something that was, in its own way, beautiful. A 
frying pan can hardly suffer as a squirrel can, but still, it was 
destruction of a sort.

And I had the standard response one has to having caused stupid 
destruction: I wanted to get rid of the evidence.

No big; I could go into the city and find myself a handsome brand-new 
bright-silver stainless steel frying pan, with the same good heavy 
base that my old pan had. I could give the old pan to the Goodwill -- 
they never get decent cooking equipment, and newly ugly as this one 
was, it was still a good frying pan. It would give someone else years 
of service. The fact that it had been beautiful and was now marred 
wouldn't affect someone else the way it affected me.

I looked at the frying pan. Of course it couldn't look back at me. 
It's only a frying pan, after all.

And then I thought of what it's like to be marred and to be discarded 
for being marred, especially when it's the result of someone else's 
dumb choices.

I thought about faces. I thought specifically about a woman I know 
who panhandles in downtown Kingston. She's ten years younger than I 
am and looks ten years older. She is unsuccessfully blonde and is 
missing a fair number of teeth. She is clearly terribly marred, 
likely as the result of her own bad choices -- but so often our bad 
choices flow from the damage done to us by others' bad choices, and I 
suspect that's where she probably is.

It was never her intention to be so badly damaged; it never is. It 
was probably not her folks' intention, either. So often, in raising 
children, we simply don't know what we're doing, and we don't think, 
and we fail to be committed to what we're doing. We don't take 
parenting seriously enough -- or we take it far too seriously in 
wrong directions. Or we pass down to them the problems with which we 
struggle. Then the children look for love in the wrong places, and 
then that damage gets compounded -- and it all shows on the skin, in 
the hair, in the posture, in the weight, but above all, in the eyes.

This woman is, in a way, very much like my frying pan: showing damage 
and therefore discarded by a society that only values the unmarred. 
As there is a wide and growing gap between the rich and poor, so 
there is a wide and growing gap between the polished-perfect people 
in the ads and those whose outer beauty, if they ever had it, has 
been destroyed by suffering. The more we treasure the perfect, the 
more we discard the marred. The more we concentrate on successful 
surfaces, the less we look for what beauty lies inside.

I thought of the way I feel when I see my own marred self in photographs.

I thought of the resurrected Jesus, who still bore his scars.

Then I got out the scrubbing stuff and the damp dishrag and the elbow 
grease. No, my frying pan will never be its former silvery self. But 
it's still a good frying pan, and dammit, I owe it something.


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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in 
no other way. -- Mark Twain