Being Tibetan

Tomorrow is the long-awaited Compassion Festival sponsored by my sangha! The monks have been working on the sand mandala for a week. I saw it today, almost finished, and it is stunning, beautiful, glorious, gorgeous, touching.

Late this afternoon, I went to the high school hosting the mandala and festival to help with food prep. I was surprised to find pretty fliers on the school's doors advertising dharma talks our monk gave for students throughout the week. The high school was massive, the main office closed, and no map to be found. Some students pointed me in the right direction. I wondered how I would know when I was approaching the right place.

I need not have worried. At the foot of the stairs, I heard recorded Tibetan chants and saw the bright yellows and greens of Tibetan Buddhist banners. There were four or five cinnamon-robe-clad monks. One was working on the mandala, measuring the edges with a compass. His sneakers peeked out from beneath the red robes. People clustered around the mandala for a glimpse. Were they parents of high school students, or just people who lived in town? I paused for a moment, bowled over by this work of art, deeply afraid of sneezing. Further down the hallway, I saw Lobsang, "our monk," answering questions, and his best friend, Amdo (another monk), at his elbow. At last I spied a woman wearing an apron dusted liberally with flour, and asked where the kitchen was.

I expected to slog through boring hours of chopping, but I was essentially treated to a cooking class on stuffing and shaping Tibetan dumplings. Chef Viktor, our leader, seemed impressed with my work, and the high school cafeteria manager half-jokingly offered me a job. It was great fun to socialize with the sangha members who were there, but meeting Chef Viktor was the real treat. He made sure that his volunteer cooks tried the carrot fudge (ohmygod, like the best carrot cake you never had) and enjoyed the samples of reject dumplings. When the other cooks cleared out and I stayed with just a few others to clean, I had the chance to chat with Chef. He grew up in Mozambique, has lived in 7 countries in 3 continents, and has studied the cuisine of all of them. He uses only Succanat for sweetener and has fascinating insights about the mineral and nutritional value of sweeteners. We both admire Jacques Pepin.

I also enjoyed the cleaning, the pulling long streams of cling wrap across trays. It reminded me of my college work study days in the Kosher Kitchen. I missed the Beatles compilation we used to play during cleanup.

As we cleaned and tidied, Lobsang and Amdo entered the kitchen. Lobsang does not know my name, but often greets me with a warm bow-handshake-hug, a fusion hello which always delights me. Chef explained that he may not return tomorrow, as he lives far away, and a Tibetan who speaks no English was slated to be running the kitchen. (I had already volunteered to lead the crew to fold the remaining 150 dumplings and fry all 300 if Chef couldn't return. Chef was glad to have me when I mentioned my high school summers frying up clamcakes.) It turns out they found another Tibetan chef who does know English, and Lobsang charmingly requested Chef's return tomorrow. You can't say no to a monk, especially one as charismatic as ours, so Chef and I will be manufacturing the dumplings together in the morning.

The food we made today is just the snacks to sell in the afternoon. The evening's dinner for 300 will be prepared by the Tibetan crew tomorrow. I wonder what time service will really happen. It's scheduled for 6. Based on my limited exposure to the Tibetan sense of time, I would guess we will eat somewhere between 6:45 and 9.

As we walked out, Chef told me the mandala is so beautiful it made him weep. We looked at it from the second-floor balcony, mesmerized by the colors and intricate patterns. Two high school girls were departing from extracurriculars at that time. They leaned over to look at the mandala again. "It's sooo beautiful," one whispered in awe.

My parents are coming up for the festival, too! Yay!

The Spring of Bathroom: Part 1

Until today, our bathroom walls were covered with what we believed to be the most hideous extant wallpaper in the known world. Why would one wallpaper a bathroom, and with dull gold, striped paper topped by a foot-wide border of precious pink and purple pansies and finished with fussy crown molding, at that?

Today, we scraped that layer off to find what is truly the most hideous extant wallpaper in the known world: a bright teal and purple fan pattern with silver sparkles throughout. We scraped until our arms ached, and still the walls are caked in dried, crumbling, yellow glue that we pray is nontoxic. The glue becomes gum on our scrapers. In random patches, a bright peach paint mysteriously emerges from beneath the glue, although most of the walls are paintless.

The smell of vinegar solution and stale glue lingers in our nostrils. The peeled, wet paper backing felt like soiled toilet paper beneath our feet. Luna Cat alternately supervised, gave us something to scoop, and napped in the kitchen.

The oddest part is, the bathroom looks infinitely better with bare walls with peach splotches than it did with that nasty mask of wallpaper. The room appears brighter, with higher ceilings.

PS. I found a single, dark hair embedded in one stratum. I briefly considered getting a DNA test so I could track down whoever committed this decoration atrocity and ask, Why, WHY?

Spring Cleaning Update

Casualty: Pyrex mixing bowl. RIP.

Status:
Kitchen--spices arranged, stove and tiles scrubbed, sliding class door washed, things thrown out from cabinets and/or consolidated. Crap thrown out includes (but is not limited to): year-old jar of maraschino cherries, caramel coffee sauce I could not stop eating, "pancake syrup".

Living room--books vetted, placed in stacks: donate to library, return to owner, keep. Slipcovers washed. Surfaces dusted. Carpet vaccuumed.

Storage closet (aka "Wampus Room")--Recycling taken to center.

I think a stanza from Frost best expresses how I'm feeling about the daunting amount of cleaning left to do:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep, 
And miles to go before I sleep.

Spring Cleaning

It's amazing how much messier everything gets in the process of spring cleaning. Now, the cookbook shelf is clean and organized, loose printouts of recipes tucked into binders or thrown away, vitamins vetted, microwave wiped down. But the rest of the kitchen is scarier than when I started.

G. is tackling the living room.

Cats are distressed.