East of the Sun

 My mom mailed me salt.

Well, technically, I mailed myself salt. It's become a tradition that whenever I leave home, my mom roasts and grinds cumin and coriander seeds and packs the powder into Ziploc bags for me to use in my cooking when I'm on my own. She also includes some other spices, like turmeric and store-bought masalas, in case for some reason I can't find my way to an Indian grocery store. This time around, she also included a Ziploc bag full of salt. I didn't notice until I had unpacked the box I took to the post office on my last day in San Diego.

I laughed at the ridiculousness of it, but I also appreciated my mom taking this drastic measure to ensure I never ate unseasoned food. They really are always several steps ahead of us, aren't they?

Moving has been, overall, an adjustment. It's exciting and frustrating and restless and comforting, all at the same time. Being in a familiar place with some familiar people around has been a big help. Nonetheless, it feels like I've chosen a strange initiation into adulthood for myself: swapping my BU Student ID card for a Faculty/Staff one, my evenings watching the sun set over Del Mar bluffs for bus rides through South Boston. 

I miss my friends from home, especially Gabi, with whom I'd spent almost every day towards the end. During my first few months at home, I found solace in watching the sunset alone, but by the fall it became our shared routine.

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. Their voices are just particularly soothing to me -- I listen to them on the bus, at work with one AirPod in; I even let them croon on as I fall asleep. I'm particularly charmed by Holiday's rendition of, "East of the Sun (West of the Moon)." and I had no idea until I saw a storybook illustration of the same name that it comes from a 19th century Norwegian fairy tale. 

Anyway, "East of the Sun" is actually the opening song of her album, Solitude and was originally written by Brooks Bowman. Other famous recordings include those by Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Tony Bennett.

(As a tangent: something I've been thinking about a bit, and would love to do more research on, is how comforting music from the 40s and 50s is because it's familiar by definition. While, later, in the 60s, there was a boom in American singer-songwriter personas a la Bob Dylan etc., the earlier decades featured many different singers working within a specific catalogue of jazz standards but still making each performance uniquely their own due to improvisation and stylistic choice. I love to read about song covers, but those from the 40s and 50s don't even feel like they can properly be called covers, since the songs seemed to be written with the intent of being shared communally.)

According to Oldtimemusic.com (lol), the lyrics of "East of the Sun (West of the Moon) are "widely believed to represent the journey of self-discovery and enlightenment." Apparently, coming East is supposed to lead to enlightenment, because "the West is where everything is mundane and predictable."

A bit on the nose in my particular case...

In the folk tale, a peasant's daughter travels East of the Sun and West of the Moon to reach the cursed prince she is supposed to marry in order to bring her father wealth. At the end of the story, the new bride and groom free everyone who has been trapped in the castle and escape with the treasures they've found within. 

Brooks Bowman wrote the song version during his time at Princeton in the 1930s. I haven't been able to find much information on why Bowman chose to write a song about this particular tale (I had never heard of it myself, but maybe it was more common knowledge back then?). 

Anyway, the story reminded me of an Indian folk tale I heard in my own childhood. This was how I remembered it, so forgive any inaccuracies in the details: A king has three daughters and each of them are supposed to plead their case for why they love him the most. One sister says she loves him as much as gold, the other sister says silver, and the last sister says salt. The king becomes enraged at the last sister, as he sees her answer as disrespectful.

Later in the story, the third daughter cooks an entire meal for her father with no salt. Her father angrily confronts her. She tells him that she has just demonstrated that one cannot have any meal without salt, so it is she who loves him the most among her sisters. He sees the folly in his earlier rage and admits: "I know now how much she loved me when she said she loved me like salt...If their food is cooked with sugar one day, it must be cooked with salt the next, or they cannot eat it."

Only upon skimming the story text now do I remember that last line about sugar. Maybe alternating between sugar and salt is like feeling the need to go East when the West becomes too mundane. Maybe chasing the sun and moon to and from each corner of the country is just my way of staving off boredom right now.