Blood and tears

I started trying to learn how to play guitar in the late 1990s. It hurt. Not my ears so much (that was more of a problem when I tried to learn the banjo). It was my fingers. The calluses weren’t hard yet and my fingertips were killing me.

The late Iva Stilwell, who played stand-up bass for The Original Orchard Grass, tried to give me a break. Sometimes to give calluses a head start, she said, you can paint your fingertips with clear nail polish.

“No,” cut in Rhoda Kemp, Iva’s banjo-playing sister. “No, don’t tell her that. She’s gotta bleed.”

I feel the same way when it comes to making latkes. I’m not talking about blood, per se, though I do tend to bleed when I cook (frigging grater). I’m talking about onions. There are people — just recently my mother became one of them — who use food processors for onion chopping. But I need to be bent over the knife, the fumes from the onions wafting up, the tears streaming down.

When you make latkes, you gotta cry a little. You just gotta.

Happy Hanukkah!