XXXIV. The Year of The Panini Press.

The year of the panini press was, in retrospect, a year. It was a press year. A cheese year. A year that pressed and pressed again.

This was not understood at first. Years rarely announce themselves while they are happening. Only afterward does one notice how the most innocent of contrivances:

a hinge, two heated plates, the steady application of pressure, have succeeded in giving shape to an entire season of life.

Bread is not a rebellious thing. Bread yields. It is simply the nature of bread to warm when warmth surrounds it and to flatten when weight descends. Bread does not maintain a separate idea of itself.

One would not call this shameful. One would hardly call it anything at all. 

Cheese, by contrast, is inclined toward a brief display of character. When the plates begin to descend, one may observe, if one has the patience for such details: a pale swelling at the edges, something that resembles the earliest utterance of an objection.

It is an exhilarating moment, but a short one.

Soon enough the cheese recalls the advantages of melting.

The press, meanwhile, has the agreeable confidence of a thing that knows exactly what it was built to do.

The press enjoys coming down. This is not trivial. People dismiss a year like that, a year of browned bread and diagonal grill marks that appear as if from nowhere, as though the marks were not made but discovered. One should never underestimate the charm of a simple mechanism faithfully performing its function.

Two plates joined by a hinge may accomplish a great deal if given sufficient heat and a modest supply of bread.

When lowered, the plates meet with a faint and civilized hiss, the small sigh of air withdrawing so that pressure may enter. The sound is entirely ordinary.

Indeed it is so ordinary that one is tempted to forget it altogether, which is perhaps the secret of its success.

All of this seems irrelevant. And yet.

At first people noticed the marks. Bread entered the press pale and departed bearing those neat diagonal lines which lend a sandwich an air of having been carefully improved by culture. The pattern looked almost decorative, the sort of thing a person might request deliberately if one had not already received it automatically.

Some suggested that perhaps the bread had always contained the pattern, and that the heat had merely revealed it.

This explanation was widely accepted.

It is always easier to believe that a mark was hidden than that it was made.

It spares the observer from attributing too much intention to the plates.

The sandwiches were, moreover, very good.

The exterior crisped without complaint. This is, after all, the highest form of cooperation. The interior retained its warmth, and the cheese distributed itself with a generosity that could only be described as public-spirited. It is difficult to lodge a complaint against something that reliably produces a decent meal.

One would feel, doing so, slightly hysterical. Slightly precious about bread.

Thus the hinge lowered. The hinge rose. Bread entered and sandwiches emerged with reassuring regularity. Days arranged themselves into a pattern almost as neat as the grill marks themselves.

There had been, it must be admitted, a certain expectation of scandal. Every well-ordered society entertains the hope that somewhere ahead lies a moment of revelation, a dramatic interruption in which the room becomes suddenly unfamiliar and everyone present realizes that they have been living, quite mistakenly, in the wrong arrangement of furniture.

Such moments possess great literary charm. No such room arrived.

The room remained perfectly itself. The press continued its work with admirable consistency.

After a while the marks ceased to attract notice. They appeared, in fact, entirely natural, rather like the grain in wood, the seams in a coat, or any other pattern that repetition eventually persuades us to call inevitable.

Bread without them would have seemed oddly unfinished. Perhaps even a little indecent.

The smell, toasted and faintly sweet, settled into the air of the kitchen like a household custom.

The hinge acquired the pleasant authority of a clock. Sandwiches were eaten with no objections.

They were, let it be said, very good.

It was a press year. A cheese year. A year that pressed, and pressed again.

And somewhere in the kitchen, with the serene punctuality of habit, bread became, as bread must, a sandwich.

For what it’s worth,

-Charlene Iris

One thought at a time.

One truth at a time. 

Because some epiphanies stay with you.