Substrate

I imagine that my kids will one day say of me, “He sure loved him some sardines on toast.” It’s true. It’s my weekend ritual these days. Around brunchtime I toast two slices of bread. I open the can of sardines, careful not to cut my finger again on the lid edge. With a fork I scrape the fish and oil into a small bowl. I sprinkle a healthy amount of pepper and a pinch or two of salt. I mash this up in the bowl. I might cut the toast into bite-sized rectangles. I apply the sardine to each bit and drip one drop of hot sauce on that. Into the maw. Maybe take a pull of lemony soda water. It’s the good life. A mundane joy par excellence.

This imagination of mine could prove wrong. They will probably say of me, “He was very grumpy if you woke him up.” People are not obligated to remember you the way you want, or to not remember you the way you don’t want. I do not ask that sardines be placed next to my grave, but try to forget my lesser moments.

Think about how you remember people: She was all about [thing]. He loved his [thing]. They were always [thinging]. He would wake up and nail a fresh load of tadpoles onto that old board of his. And so forth. A lot of the time we capture people’s specific moments or phases as the way they were. With parents and older relatives or neighbors or acquaintances, this increases. When the person about whom I am thinking is older than me, I tend to think of them as unchanging.

For all people, I register the thing they were into when I last heard as their thing. I refer to what I think is their thing months or years later and they have to pause to even remember having been into that thing. With my kids, I assume they still like a song or artist. They call it natsukashii. It has graduated to fond-memory status in their world. I have to adjust my mental profile of them. I have been into sardines on toast for more than a year now. Does that meet the standard of “He would always”? Maybe. In the end, sardines will have been a ritual for over one percent of my life.

It was fate, maybe birthright, that I should love tinned fish. My dad loves him some kipper snacks. (Based on decades-old observation, nay, The Lore—I probably need to check and update his profile as needed.) I love them too, but sardines are what I can get.

One of my first paid simultaneous interpretation gigs was at a gerontology conference held in Okinawa. At the time, it was considered to be one of the places in the world with the longest life spans. People talked about how in their cooking, pork gets cooked twice, removing a lot of the harmful fat, or that folks there are happier and do more laughing and dancing, and other conjecture. These could be factors. Later, I also heard that the average age statistics may have been influenced upward by a lot of deaths going officially unreported. Local governments thought more people were still kicking around than really were.

At one point during the conference, I was called upon to take a commemorative photo of some of the most prominent minds in that field, and I demanded that they all say “gerontologEEEE.”

The big takeaway from hearing things about gerontology was this point that a speaker emphasized: The moment a human is born, they begin aging. We are all aging, always. I like that. There is not a threshold past which a person is aging. It is a constant aspect of life. Aging is just changing. I may not like sardines on toast at some point. I may switch to a new substrate. I have dabbled in tortilla chips. Triscuits would be ideal if only available. What an elite substrate.