Wabi-Sabi

This is probably as close to Jackson Pollock as a photo of ours will ever get. It's a straight-up photograph (no post-production effects necessary) of the bottom of a 13x9" baking pan that my mother, Rose Marie Gladieux, has owned since I was a child in the late Pleistocene.

Growing up, I knew this pan well. I washed it in our kitchen sink in New York as one of my chores to earn an allowance. When I was old enough to wield a spatula, I learned to lift out perfect squares of frosted loaf cake and slide them onto dessert plates. In junior high I made brownies (not that kind; just plain brownies!) for my friends, and we ate them warm, pried right from the pan. I was responsible for a lot of those knife scratches in the aluminum.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic based on the Buddhist idea that nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect. Seen through a wabi-sabi lens, a chipped teacup is more beautiful than a new one, and a faded autumn leaf can teach acceptance of transience. "Wabi" can mean natural simplicity; "sabi" is something like the patina or serenity that comes with age. This baking pan is wabi-sabi, I think. Its scratches remind me of all those long-gone loaf cakes and brownies, and to me it's much more beautiful now than it could have been when new.

But enough philosophizing: I have to get that pan back into my mother's cabinet in case she wants to use it tonight! Everything is transient, but there's no need to rush.