Metaphoring Practice

In my summer reading, I try to balance teacher reading and pleasure reading. Not that I don’t also find pleasure in teacher reading, but it’s not quite the same as being transported into another place and time and circumstance by the craft of a wordsmith. Of course, no educational text could teach you more than letting Toni Morrison’s Beloved wash over your eyes and ears and flow out through your soul. So there is overlap.

One of the more teachery books I have read this summer is Metaphors and Analogies: Power Tools for Teaching Any Subject, by Rick Wormeli.  It’s a good primer on the power of metaphors as sense-making devices. I have written about that before. Wormeli reminded me why I want to do more work with metaphor and analogy making with my classes this year.

In the spirit of writing as practice, in my morning pages the other day, I played with some metaphoring myself in my writing practice this week.

July 9, writing on my back patio, 12:30 ish (so not quite morning pages):

I had a metaphor for breakfast today.

The other night we ordered dinner from a local Tex-Mex kind of place. I ordered buffalo chicken tacos in the hard shells, and I was really looking forward to every ounce of their spicy deliciousness. I know crispy tacos don’t hold up well over time. So with wait time and travel time, it was going to be risky. But crispy tacos are SOOOOO much better than soft. And the purveyor is only a couple of minutes from home, so I ordered them.

Unfortunately, the risk/reward calculus did not come out in my favor that day.

I opened the box. They smiled up at me, deceptively, those tacos. I actually ordered 2 buffalo chicken with a ground beef back up. With their accoutrements - lettuce, cheese, sour cream, pico de gallo - peeking out the top of the carmel colored “crispy” tortilla, they looked perfect.

But as I picked the first one up, it disintegrated in my hand. The underside - the flap of toasted tortilla that was supposed to be supporting all of the spicy, juicy, cheesy goodness - just couldn’t live up to expectations. It was literally disintegrating to the point of I-don’t-want-to-touch-that-slimy-thing grossness.

Fighting back tears of disappointment, I tried to gain some taco sustenance by scraping up some of the taco fillings with the side of chips they came with. But my heart wasn’t in it anymore.

I took any salvageable chips out of the box, closed the lit, and went to the refrigerator telling myself I could resurrect these remnants into something tasty the next day. The bones were good. It wasn’t their fault. I knew the risks when I dialed the phone.

Two days they sat before I could face them again. But this new day came with some cooking courage. I was going to eat those tacos for breakfast.

So I got out my red copper square pan skillet (I’m a sucker for the As seen on TV aisle), drizzled in a little EVOO and then opened the taco box. The decomposition wasn’t entirely halted by the cold of the refrigerator. They were a little grosser, and floppier. But with a few minutes of tearing the softened taco shell and scraping the taco guts into the oil, I had a pan full of buffalo chicken, cheese, tortilla, pico de gallo. All things with great gustatory potential on their own, but which hadn’t worked out in their original concoction.  (I have a lot of old journals and saved writing files that I feel the same way about.)

Ten minutes later, I sat down at my table with a plate of relatively crispy reconstructed goodness. It wasn’t perfect, but it was tasty. Better than I had anticipated actually. Savory seconds.

Now, I’m off to read through some old journals.