The story of Soup

Of Wild Dogs and French Canadiennes

The “soup” list began as a tongue-in-cheek metaphor for the random and spicy tidbits that would get mixed together in my first emails from travels abroad.

When trying to come up with a name for this list, which has gathererd mass, momentum, and dust, I was short on time and long on inspiration.

I was eating my favorite soup that day (potato-corn chowder), and I thought of the process of making soup…boiling things down slowly, ingredients often thrown in more by inspiration and availability than by recipie.

My french-canadian friends call this process "Est-q'u'il'a," (anglo-pronunciation: "uh-ski-uh"). My frantic attempt to scribe this phrase on the back of a band's show-flier was laughed off by my friends, who explained that it's not a "real" phrase, and that they didn't even know how to spell it. (My friend Cybil wrote it down for me as "askia.") So, technically it's not a word or a phrase; it's just life-language created with the poetic licence the Quebequios adore, and the French abhor. It means, "With what we have." And as we created a wild curry from 4 random vegetables, some leftover tofu, a banana, and the tailings of the peanut-butter jar, I came to understand what they meant.

And that’s a lot of the way the events, sketches, characters, and settings come into my brain. Each takes on the flavor of the others in the crock-pot of my mind, until it boils over. Somewhere in this metaphor, there is a sense of interconnection, of acceptance of what you have, and finding nourishment in it. There is something about this process of making Soup that seems to echo the way we all wish we could take life. It seems like a good thing to have in mind when telling the stories of other’s lives.

After thinking on this name for a few months, I recalled another story that may have spiced my inspiration.

There once was a dog named "Soup." A ratty, loved, tousle-haired hippie-terrier of some sort. I only knew Soup tangentally, through friends-of-friends. But his story, and Jay’s, stuck with me.

Soup was born on a reservation in Eastern Oregon. Jay was working on an anthropology study there, and one day some kids brought him a puppy balled up in their hands. Part of the tradition there was to make dog-soup for the chief, but the women had other plans for this dog, and sent the kids to tell him, “Hey, this is your dog.”

Now, Jay is not one to pass up a random path in life, but taking on the responsibility to care for another should be considered. So he asked, “What if he’s not my dog?”

They replied, “Then, he will be soup.” And he was. For many, many years.

I don’t think the Soup-list is named for that spunky furball. But there is something in that story too. Something about caring for a thing which might be discarded by another, and finding a way forward together that didn’t exist before. This too seems to be a good thing to have in mind for this humble bowl of Soup.

~ Provecho!

 

“They're talking about money for metal detectors and bombs. Now, I don’t know about you, but I feel safe when I have warm food in my belly, and my friends around me.” –M. Franti