“I enter these contests,” she said. She indicated a pile of pages torn from magazines. “They all ask you to do the same thing. They want you to tell them, ‘in your own words,’ or ‘in twenty-five words or less,’ why you like the thing they make, whatever it is. Let’s see—suitcases, orange juice, padlocks, pineapple slices, car wax, shoe polish, toilet cleaner—they go on and on. There are more of them every week. I can hardly keep up with them.”
“Do you win a lot of things?”
“I’m starting to,” she said. “At first, I didn’t win anything. Nothing at all.”
“Mm,” I said.
“I didn’t get it. I didn’t get how to do it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But they send you the winners, if you ask them to. Not the winners. What the winners wrote. The winning entries.”
“Right.”
“So I studied them. Very carefully. And I learned the secrets. So now I win more and more often. You can do it, too.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I think so. Let me show you what I do.” She seemed to be about to tell me her secrets, and I leaned forward, the better to hear them, but then she paused, pursed her lips, and with a twinkle in her eyes she said, “Better yet—a vivid demonstration! You wait right there.”
She got up from the table and began rummaging in the kitchen.
“Have you ever been to India?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Good.” She took a couple of jars from the cabinets and a roll from the bread box. She began making a sandwich. “Have you ever been to England?”
“I’ve never been out of the United States,” I said.
“Good, good. This should work, then.” She cut the sandwich and gave me half. “Take a bite,” she said.
I took a bite. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It seemed to be a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. The peanut butter I was sure about, but there was something funny about the jelly. It was odd, intriguing, tasty, but not quite like anything I’d tasted before.
“How do you like it?” she asked.
“It’s good. It’s different.”
“Ah,” she said. “‘Different.’ What’s different?”
“The jelly. It’s kind of—sharp—sour—”
She raised an eyebrow expectantly.
“—and I-don’t-know-what.”
She smiled.
“That’s chutney,” she said.
“Ah!” I said. “Chutney.”
“Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“Well, for the purposes of our demonstration, it represents the shock of the new.”
“The shock of the new,” I said, nodding. I liked it. I knew I would use it often.
“And what else is in that sandwich?”
“Peanut butter.”
“You recognized that right away.”
“Oh, sure.”
“It was familiar.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The shock of the new—cushioned by the familiar.”
“Aha,” I said, as if I understood.
“And what else?”
I took another bite. I shrugged. “That’s all,” I said.
She shook her head, but said nothing, just kept her lips pursed, until I got it.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “The roll. Hope.”
“The shock of the new, cushioned by the familiar, wrapped in hope,” she said. “That’s what wins these contests.”
[to be continued]
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🎧 828: “I enter . . .”