Terroir Cancer

In the NY Times of Tuesday, September 3, is a fun article about the French concept of terroir--the assertion that certain places, some very localized and contained, create the best of a certain type of product. In the gross sense, the Champage region is a terroir, but there are apparently terroirs for all sorts of things, and many quite a bit smaller than an entire region.

It was a funny article to come across because I've been thinking quite a bit about how territorial cancer itself is, and yet how individualized. My first chemo is theoretically thought to have failed because I am one of a small group of people resistant to it and radiation in combination--there's no way to know before, and no way to know for sure. My landscape didn't support the sprout of its particular asparagus of cancer-killing agents.

No one has told me, and I haven't broached the subject, of how much that may have set me back--whether I received any benefit from it or not. There are times when I don't want to know things but simply want to believe things. In this case, I'd like to believe that I at least scythed the top growth of cancer and reduced its ultimate harm to me. I will in fact think or discuss little more about it. The better version of the truth can grow in the shade of this plot of mental land, for all I care, and stay well out of the light of my mind.

I had a particularly nice Labor Day weekend, too. We have a visitor from Indiana, Charles, and last night, a chili dinner with Charles and Terry. Somehow, the very notion of having two people over for dinner was very exotic (this being San Francisco, any more than that would have been mind blowingly engaging but crowded). I still like cooking, and factually, I make some of the best chili in the world--at least the Midwestern version. I have certain talents that are inexplicable. I make the best drip coffee. I have no idea how or why, but it does taste better when I make it than when Charles or Scott makes it, for example.

When I would visit my family for holidays, they would all gasp at how strongly I made coffee and clutch their throats and gag and lolly around and then ask when I was going to make more. Somehow the secondary and not the primary response convinced me I was on to something.

Chili became, and I don't know how, one of those things, too. Granted, I used to make it in Indiana on a regular basis. Chili is a year-round food to me (or was, I'm looking forward to a return to "is") so I've had plenty of practice. But practice can make poor creations just as permanent as good ones. If one's practice in making cookies involves them tasting like hot crap in the end, bets are on they will stay that way with performance.

These are not empty boasts, then--I have witnesses, and in my personal terroir the disparate notes of well dripped caffeine and well combined tomato sauces and chunks serve their acidic notes waft through the air. I also make the best cinnamon jumble cookies, but that's because I don't know anyone else who makes them. In that case, it's mere supposition driving me forward.

My Labor Day was filled with a kind of peace I don't engage with enough--the peace one finds through conversation and liveliness, my day usually being passed in much more quiet and peace than that. I enjoyed the change of pace. I enjoyed taking an afternoon walk and buying a smoothie with Scott and Chuck, down in the Castro--also something I don't do much on my own--in fact, something I never do. I hate going out alone in public as it's hard for me to order anything, I get stared at which I hate, and much as I do enjoy being alone, it can be uninspiring to have a great choco-smoothie and have no one around to say: "this smoothie rocks my ass."

I admit I don't get out of the house into humanity much, so when it happens, it is notable and I see things I don't miss, but are fun artifacts of where I live. I forget that I live in the epicenter of gay life in the U.S. I forget that the weather that surrounds me isn't a national pleasure. I forget that the little thrill I get seeing the fog roll in watching out of the kitchen window isn't the nightly show in Des Moines.

It's good to remember the territory you live in, and what makes it special, and what it produces better than any other place. Especially good if the territory is you.