Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
The wonderful internet
What I haven’t been talking about is a project, a bit of research I’ve been doing for the last six months or so in lieu of actual, you know, writing. Haven’t mentioned it for fear of jinxing it. Still won’t mention it (beyond this slight mention) for fear of jinxing it. Anyway, in the spirit of research, I found the blog The Price of Silver written by Florida photographer Alan Kaplan. Specifically, I went hunting for information on a Native American dish, sofkee. Alan Kaplan writes: “Think making coffee by putting the coffee into a pan of boiling water, then pouring that into a cup without straining the grounds out of it first. You just use the corn instead of coffee. The corn is softer, less gritty than coffee grounds, but you drink both the liquid on top as well as the soggy corn meal. Different perhaps, but not really all that bad.”
His is a quiet voice . . . regular posts about his meals, his difficulty gaining weight, his adventures with his companion Monkette (a stuffed animal), his photography. He features in many of his photos, and I have the impression of a gaunt, curly-haired fellow, a Kurt Vonnegut type if Vonnegut hadn’t gone gray. He wrote regularly and despite having few to no comments to his posts. Not an attention slave like moi.
Yeah, “wrote”. I fast forwarded to see his recent stuff, and my fast forwarding ground to a halt in the early part of 2010. Alan Kaplan died in late December 2009, complications during recovery from a heart attack. On the notice of his passing (written by his son and daughter), there are 64 comments. So, no, he was not writing in a vacuum.
The Price of Silver carries the following message below the title:
“The price of one admission is your life.” The same with silver. You get hooked. You get close. You want more. More is not enough.
. . . which reads like poetry, I think.
D.
