Picking Stones from Rice

A couple of lifetimes ago, my wife and I took a year off from school and traveled around the world. One of many highlights was living for three months in a small village in Kerala, India, where I studied a drum and she took some spinning lessons. Most days, we ate lunch at a little restaurant, every day the same dish simply called “meal.” The delightful waiter Seshan circled around with a big bowl of rice and scooped a portion on to our banana leaf plates. Then came various vegetables that circled the rice and a small bowl of yogurt to mix in and sometimes, a papadum crisp wafer. We ate with our right hand and the whole meal was delicious, nutritious, sensual and ecological (as we tossed our banana leaves out the door and the crows ate leftovers). 

 

But sometimes there would be a disturbing crunch and we found ourselves picking out a small stone that had been cooked with the rice. After this happened several times over many meals, we suggested to Seshan that we would like to keep our teeth intact. With typical humor, he answered, “Oh, you want rice without stones! Why didn’t you say so!” 

 

Indeed, when the rice is harvested and laid out on the patio, one of the jobs someone has is to pick out stones from the rice. Every day in this new modern world, I get some 30 e-mails and have to spend my precious time deleting the invitations for hair-growth or remedy skin tags or liposuction or printer ink, sort through the tsunami of political requests, decide if it’s worth it to open Nice News or Inspiring Quotes or History Facts or Words Trivia. Out of 30 e-mails, perhaps 5 are actually personal and/or important to read and what used to be a pleasure (“You got mail!”) is now a chore, doubled because I delete them both on my computer and my phone. 

 

Perhaps it will help to imagine it as picking stones from rice so I can get to what actually feeds me. One of life’s little chores that is necessary if we’re not to break our teeth. The problem with the metaphor is that proportionally, there are many, many more stones than actual grains of rice! 

Oh well. I guess that’s what I signed up for when I agreed to be born in the 20^th century and decided to keep living into the 21^st. Given a choice between going to where no e-mails will ever reach me and spending ten minutes a day picking out stones, I’ll opt for number two.