It’s a Sunday midnight and I’ve just eaten a Cold Boiled Potato.
I shall never be able to write one-tenth of my fondness for a Cold
Boiled Potato.
A Cold Boiled Potato is always an unpremeditated episode which is its
chief charm.
It’s nice to happen on a book of poetry on a window-sill. It’s nice
to surprise a square of chocolate in a glove box. It’s nice to come
upon a little yellow apple in ambush. It’s nice to get an unexpected
letter from Jane Gillmore. It’s nice to unearth a reserve fund of
silk stockings under a sofa pillow. And especially it’s nice to find
a Cold Boiled Potato on a pantry shelf at midnight.
I like caviare at luncheon. And I like venison at dinner, dark and
bloody and rich. And I like champagne bubbling passionately in a
hollow-stemmed glass on New Year’s day. And I like terrapin turtle.
And I like French-Canadian game-pie. And artichokes and grapes and
baby onions. And none of them has the odd gnome-ish charm of a Cold
Boiled Potato at midnight.
I can imagine no circumstance in which a Cold Boiled Potato would not
take precedent with me at midnight. If I had a broken arm: if I had a
husband lying dead in the next room: if I were facing abrupt worldly
disaster: if there were a burglar in the house: if I’d had a dayful
of depression: if God and opportunity were knocking and clamoring at
my door: I should disregard each and all some minutes at midnight if
I had also a Cold Boiled Potato.
I love to read Keats’s Nightingale in my hushed life. I love to
remember Caruso at the Metropolitan singing Celeste Aïda. I love to
watch the bewitching blonde Blanche Sweet in a moving picture. I love
to feel the summer moonlight on my eyelids. And it’s disarmingly
contented I am with a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.
Content is my rarest emotion and I get it at midnight out of a Cold
Boiled Potato.
Some things in life thrill me. Some drive me garbledly mad. Some
uplift me. Some debauch me. Some strengthen and enlighten me. Some
hurt, hurt, hurt. But I’m not thrilled nor maddened nor uplifted nor
debauched nor strengthened nor enlightened nor hurt, but only fed-up
and fattened in spirit by a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.
I stand in the pantry door leaning against the jamb, with a tiny
glass salt-shaker in one hand and the sweet dark pink Cold Boiled
Potato in the other. And I sprinkle it with salt and I nibble,
nibble, nibble. And I say aloud, ‘Gee, it’s good!’
I liked Cold Boiled Potato at four-and-twenty. I liked it at
seventeen. I liked it at twelve. At three I climbed on cake-boxes in
search of one. And now in the deep bloom of being myself I am made
roundly replete at midnight with a Cold Boiled Potato.
A Cold Boiled Potato--it tastes of chestnuts at midnight, the first
frost-kissed chestnuts in the woods: and it tastes of rain-water and
of salt and of roses: it tastes of young willow-bark and of earth
and of grass-stems: it tastes of the sun and the wind and of some
nameless relishingness born of the summer hillside that grew it: it
tastes at midnight so _like_ a Cold Boiled Potato.
A precious peach-colored orchid, an antique spider-web-like lace
handkerchief, a delicate purple butterfly, an emerald bracelet: I’d
strive for each of those in an eagerly casual way. But it’s like an
ogre at midnight I pounce on a Cold Boiled Potato.
A Cold Boiled Potato reminds me of the Dickens books in which so much
food is eaten cold and tastes so savory--even the ‘wilderness of cold
potatoes’ portioned to the Marchioness by Sally Brass. And it reminds
me of the Rip Van Winkle play--‘give this fellow a cold potato
and let him go.’ And it reminds me of Hamlet--funeral baked meats
might include it. And it reminds me of Robin Hood’s merry men, and
Huckleberry Finn, and the Canterbury Pilgrims, and the Prodigal Son,
and all the picturesque wayfarers. It reminds me of the poor as a
colorful race wrapped around with hungry romance. It reminds me that
life is full of life--rich and fruitful and evolutionary and cosmic:
few things feel so cosmic as a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.
It makes me want as I nibble to plant a field of potatoes on a
southern-exposed hill and hoe them and dig them all by myself: and
give all but one to the poor and Boil that to eat Cold at midnight.
I have to be very hungry to crave a Cold Boiled Potato, but being
hungry no possible morsel of food can so interest me at midnight. The
same potato hot is domestic and tasteless. The same potato at ten
in the evening lukewarm within and sodden with memories of dinner,
is a repellent item. At midnight it is all unexpected magnetism. At
midnight my whole being is profoundly courteous, wooingly cordial
toward a Cold Boiled Potato.
If I had only what I deserved my portion might well be a Cold Boiled
Potato. Intrinsically it is rated low and I know me to be a sort
of jezebel. But I’d wonder each midnight if whoever metes out the
deserts in this surprising universe knew with what gust I rise at
it--_would_ I get it.
Nor am I satisfied like the meek and lowly with my midnight supper of
Cold Boiled Potato: damn the meek and lowly. It’s a satanic delight
I take in it. It’s a sly private orgie I make of it: a pirate’s
banquet, a thieves’ picnic, a pagan rite, a heathen revelry, a
conceit all and unhallowedly my own. My thoughts as I nibble are set
mostly on my villainies. No food I eat brings me so broad a license
of feeling--a sense of freedom--as a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.
On a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight I am lightly valorous: call me
a trickster and I’ll call you a rotter: call me a liar and I’ll
call you a traitor: call me a coward and I’ll call you another: not
pugnaciously but gayly and serenely.
I am then in my most bespeaking mood. Anyone who met me standing
nibbling in a pantry doorway at midnight would be charmed. I would
talk with a dainty ribaldry and offer to share the feast.
For shadow-things piled too near God compensates me in unexpected
midnights with a Cold Boiled Potato: along with it a pantry doorway
to stand in and a little glass salt-shaker to hold in my other hand.
_The strange braveness_