TO HEALTH

Broiled eggplant and pickled cucumber on toasted sunflower bread with vegan butter. Vegetables from my landlady.

“In the early 1960s, a physician named Stewart Wolf heard about a town of Italian immigrants and their descendants in northeast Pennsylvania where heart disease was practically unknown. Wolf decided to take a closer look at the town, Roseto. He found that almost no one under age fifty-five showed symptoms of heart disease. Men over sixty-five suffered about half the number of heart problems expected of average Americans. The overall death rate in Roseto was about one-third below national averages. After conducting research that carefully excluded factors such as exercise, diet, and regional variables like pollution levels, Wolf and sociologist John Bruhn concluded that the major factor keeping folks in Roseto healthier longer was the nature of community itself. Everybody knew everybody else intimately, so that the bonding of reciprocal exchange could hold people together. People gave with the expectation of taking and took with expectation of giving.” 

My beautiful landlady (a surrogate kin)— it has been that way ever since moving to Maui, she, like an auntie or mom, who lives below my flat, takes care of me with weekly rations of local vegetables and fruits she picks out carefully so the prettiest and greenest I get (she even wraps the papaya in newspaper and stubs out the root ends of cabbages and almost always leaves a paper cup with a fragrant flower in it, yesterday was a gardenia, inside the produce bag carefully tied outside my door) with a note of aloha. I take care of her, too, in a dutiful and respectful (and artful) grateful way like a son (the fellow living upstairs a longtime tenant of her the writer from New York she has been fond of as I have been, too, very much indeed of her) and have always in exchange of food I surprise her by her front door putting small gifts on the pink plastic baby chair her grand daughter sits in when her family’s around to visit, with her favorite milk chocolate (candy or cookie) and cute little trinkets to match/mismatch, for fun, like a turtle eraser or comfy ankle socks with a cat embroidery on it, all these with my signature homemade card I cut out from cartoon magazines and her gifts all elegantly wrapped up with a string bow and almost always with words of thanks that melt her heart. Not far (spiritually) from us on the west coast mainland is a lovely and fabulous single mother with a high-level corporate career in healthcare who takes care of four handsome boys, amazingly pulling it off with fervent dedication— and she happens to be my best and childhood friend that through our long relationship all these years has been for each other with a special bond I call altruistic siblings, sharing everything, especially when carrying us through in difficult times and good times, we love sharing recipes (I told her to cook for her boys last week, NYTimes-derived, a scallion-honey glazed mushroom udon yakisoba), and she said they loved it! And not far from her in the same So. Cal. city is my real, biological sister, older than me by a year, and the three of us, plus counting my late mom’s best friend living North of the state, we were all neighbors growing up, and till now, though I have moved the farthest, have synthesized emotionally and materially into the true definition of what family is all about — and that’s all about unconditional love, in light of the context in which that unconditional love was formed through loyal and abiding friendship from day one. And that completes my “community” — which transcends so much health and support for my mind and body, aspirations, sense of belonging, not to mention my stomach always full of wellness food. The book I’m reading now (where the above quote came from) is about the science of how humans evolved to be tribal and members of many but forming a unit that stood by each other through thick or thin, from our hunting-gathering days when food was seasonal, to the discovery of agriculture and land cultivation around 10,000 years ago when food production was controlled and lasting longer. The take away is cohesion as genetically embedded in our nature as people. And food was the glue.