Of Cabbages and Things

Sylvia Shawcross

Now, I was looking at the cabbage. It was $7.29. It is true. The cabbage, a tiny little thing compared to the cabbages I remember flourishing in the fields (making it hard to walk up and down the rows sometimes), was not on sale.

And that was too bad because at night now it is cool and the stars seem brighter and even though it is still August and we once had the dog days of summer to swelter under, now it is not this way and that means it is time to make the first stew. With turnips and potatoes and carrots and cabbage and whatever else we can find on hand. But always a bay leaf. Always. It is what people in the north have always done.

But the cabbage was $7.29.

And I thought about how the federal government here in Canada is giving the old people a break with dental coverage and yet, what good does having teeth do when there is nothing a person can afford to eat except maybe ramen noodles and dandelion greens and tomato soup made from catsup packages?

What I ask, is the point of teeth with no food? Better we should simply take up bone-carving and make little miniature chess pieces out of our new teeth for sale on Etzy or something. Then maybe we could afford to buy a cabbage for $7.29.

But I suppose that is not the point of this tirade. Or maybe it is. I’ll never know until I get to the end as it happens sometimes for this writer. Maybe the point was North Korea. I was listening to a refugee from North Korea, who when asked about the differences between societies mentioned the oddest thing: there are no cookbooks in North Korea. They have no cookbooks because they don’t have a lot of food and very little variety and they already know how to cook what they have. So what would be the point of a cookbook? And so we can conclude that western decadence involves cookbooks. But never mind all that.

The point is North Korea supposedly has nuclear weapons now. This is upsetting the whole world order as it has always been. The rotund little man educated in the western world has his finger on a button and we get up in the morning to complain about cabbages. I imagine he learned all about nuclear weapons from his western education but that is neither here nor there because it simply illustrates that we have had and still apparently have some of the strangest people with their fingers on buttons and we’ve all managed to live with the notion all this time.

However, the notion that is hardest to live with right now is how is it that all this tax-payer money went to save the Ukraine only to discover that the Ukraine is now invading Russia. For ffkssakkes! Really? I mean really!???!?

Now, hear me out. The reason that cabbage costs $7.29 is because the Ukraine needs to invade Russia—a world nuclear superpower. The government can’t help farmers make cabbages but can help the military industrial complex apparently save democracy even as they dismantle it at home. And this is how the world works: It is an absurdity of cabbages, false teeth and countries with Messiah complexes. The people running the world have no idea what they’re doing and spend their days attempting to convince us that they know what they’re doing. They don’t.

Right now it is all about causing or threatening to cause horrible fear and death and destruction and the sad part is, this fear of nuclear annihilation is also absurd.

We should be so lucky as to all go up in a puff of smoke singing Hallelujah. No. We will as humans mostly end up surviving and have to get on with our days dusting off the radioactive waste from our cars in the morning and having iodine with our tea and raising two-headed puppy dogs and staving off the hungry hordes with garden hoes and shovels and making stew from cricket cabbages. We don’t get off that easily you know. We never have.

Oh here’s an earworm of some sort: