The Pickle Game

There’s a movie I love, an 80s rom com called Crossing Delancey. It stars Amy Irving as Isabelle, who lives and works on the Upper West Side, at an independent bookshop, but whose grandmother, her bubbe, lives on the Lower East Side. Despite Isabelle’s insistence she’s fulfilled—“I have a rent-controlled apartment people would kill for!”—“I organize the most prestigious reading series in New York!”—Bubbe knows she needs a husband— “If you’re alone, you’re sick!” Bubbe hires the neighborhood matchmaker. Isabelle looks down her nose at the chosen: Sam, the pickleman. Isabelle doesn’t know he’s loved her for years and leapt at the opportunity to meet her. Isabelle finds herself torn. Eventually, awkwardly, she sets Sam up with her friend who has no such qualms. “You know he sells pickles, right?” she asks another friend who reports on the successful couple. The reply: “Well, someone has to!”

That “has to” makes me chuckle every time I watch Crossing Delancey, because it’s not as if pickles are essential to our existence as a species. I can imagine a world without pickles, even if I don’t want to. But I think that figurative “has to” is a way of articulating something profoundly true. Pickles—particularly those sold on the Lower East Side by Sam—are so connected to so much of the world: traditions, history, culture, daily lives in gritty New York, ancestors from the Old World. Pickles are tied to what’s real with a thousand cords, and the tension of those cords—the “has to”—is something I feel everywhere in my life where I find meaning.

Someone does not literally have to sell pickles, but they do if the world is to be as rich a place as it is. The space between subsistence and deliciousness represents an opportunity that we can choose to accept or not.

I was recently reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and came across this exhortation:

Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple ‘I must,’ then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

That’s a lot of pressure!

When I ask myself must I write? The “I must” I find is not a simple one, because I can think of a world in which I don’t write, and a dozen reasons not to write, a hundred distractions, a thousand easier, still meaningful, things to do. But the I must that I do have is real. It has the same kind of necessity as the “has to” in Crossing Delancey: an opportunity I can choose to accept, a gate I can pass through into a richer, harder, more vital world.

But pickles haven’t just been metaphors in my life.

I remember one autumn afternoon when I was a kid, I was walking around the Lower East Side with my mom and I wished aloud for a pickle. We turned a corner and saw the whole block of Orchard between Rivington and Delancey given over to a pickle festival! It was a miracle of a coincidence, but perhaps a little less surprising given the neighborhood where I grew up, just a few blocks away from The Pickle Guys, the shop Sam’s is based on. It’s now kitty-corner from where it was when the movie was made and for most of my childhood, but the pickles are the same.

One Saturday early during the pandemic, when I was living at home, my mom went out to get groceries. She went from shop to shop and the last of them was The Pickle Guys. As the man behind the counter was wrapping up her purchase, he asked whether my mom wanted a separate bag for the pickles or whether they could go in with her other groceries. When my mom said she didn’t want them smelling like pickles, the pickle guy observed, “Best smell in the world!”

Well, it is. But as in all things, context is key, and the joy of the smell of pickles is especially context dependent. To wit, consider one evening last summer, returning home from my friend Monty’s, where we’d just had dinner.

Monty is a magnificent cook. He walks around the world with his unique enthusiasm that doesn’t leave when he enters the kitchen. Whenever we talk on the phone, one of us inevitably asks, “So, what have you been cooking lately?” As often as not, Monty’s answer involves a passion of his: fermentation. Last summer, he gave me a jar of homemade pickles! I was delighted and put it right in my tote bag. At the end of the evening, I picked up my bag, soaked with pickle juice. This was not the right context!

I knew Monty’s pickles would be delicious, but I’d need to wait a while to find that out for sure. Coming soon, on The Kitchen Game.