In this space, over the weekend, I went off on quite a rant about importing stuff from China, in light of the massive pet food recalls. I later deleted it, because I thought it was mean spirited. But the question remains: why does the world’s bread basket need to import its wheat gluten? I know you’ve wondered too, and this article at Slate explains.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration blocked imports of wheat gluten from a Chinese company on Monday. The agency identified the company as the source of the tainted wheat gluten that caused a massive pet-food recall last week. Given how much wheat is produced by American farmers, why do we need to import wheat gluten?

Because it’s cheaper than buying domestic gluten. We may be the world’s largest exporter of wheat, shipping a billion bushels to other countries in last year’s growing season. Yet we export relatively little wheat gluten. To extract the gluten from wheat, you have to separate it from the starch, by repeatedly washing and kneading wheat flour. But only four U.S. companies go through this process; last year, they produced roughly 100 million pounds of wheat gluten, about 20 percent of the domestic demand.

I went for a walk before dinner, to watch the late spring sun go down, and found myself thinking about her again. It has been a while since I did, and I wonder if she ever finds an image of me in her mind, some whiff of memory like this. It’s unlikely, since I have forgotten everything of her and that time and place. It’s been so long. I moved away, moved on, met women, raised and buried dogs, and I am not a young man any more.

It was a rainy autumn day and everything had a dull and sickly sheen. Unpolished pearl. Coming out into the hallway, I saw the light from the windows was weak. The overhead fluorescent tubes were strong, which always makes my spirit drain away. She stood by the elevator in a burgundy dress and black stockings, black shoes, holding a fawn coat. I had seen her in the meeting I just left, sitting off to the side, taking notes, quiet. I thought she must be shy. But in the elevator, just the two of us, she started talking as if we had met before. She said she would hate to miss her run through the park after work. She loved the paths along the creek, which was high and angry with the rain. Sometimes she ran in bad weather but not that day, because she thought she was fighting a cold. She woke up with a hint of sore throat, but we should meet for coffee after work. This was not an invitation, but a declaration of impulsive certainty. She said we should do this, so we did.

She had light brown hair and soft green eyes. Find a fern early in the morning, when the sun first touches it, and turn the fronds over gently. If they are still wet, you’ve seen the color of her eyes. Just that green. Which is what I think about tonight, spraying down my kitchen countertops and wiping them with paper towels. Now look at my eyes, washed by the light cast down from the ceiling, born back from the white cabinets, scattered on the spoons and glasses that I rinse in hot water. The eyes of a man like me send back everything they can’t believe or don’t deserve. Like hubcaps simply rolling on, they’ve reflected everything for years, and sent it back dim and distorted.

We did not get married in the height of summer, as you might expect, when the leaves stood out against the sky pretending to be shocked by thirst. She was gone by then – God knows where, maybe Ohio – and I went on living, apparently. But what happened first might make a story, I don’t know.

First, I didn’t hear from her for weeks. I left a casual message, not wanting to seem too eager. I thought she was beautiful, out of my league. But she’d started it, and had suggested dinner two nights after the coffee. That went well, but then there was silence and no response from her. Like those scenes in Jaws when the shark goes deep and everything seems normal for a while. I really didn’t think about her much. I was busy with work and the holidays. I drove to Tahoe for Christmas. I remember sledding with my nephews down the hill behind my sister’s house, and crashing, lying in the snow laughing like a kid myself, and their happy Airedale running up to lick my face.

When I got home, there she was, on the answering machine. We went out. She liked exotic food and wine. She thought she knew more about both than she really did, but that didn’t bother her. There’s a learning curve with the finer things. She took her time. I gave her every opportunity. And before I knew it she was with me all the time, and kept a toothbrush by my sink.

She was fond of going barefoot in the yard, and loved to water plants. My dog adored her when she sat on the grass with him and brushed his coat, and threw his tennis ball and laughed. She was rarely quite so kind to me. She loved dogs but not cats, grass but not flowers, the death of sex but not the life of intimacy. She didn’t like the way I dressed; I needed polo shirts, deck shoes; she said there was a trend I was not in. I tried, as I tried to like her trendy friends, her tastes in music and food.

I floated around her; an acolyte but barely there to her. The abstract entity called boyfriend, circumambulating grace; the green eyes, the taut and alabaster form that kicked my ass at racquetball and didn’t care for reading books.

We did a weekend at a lake, to get away, though I never knew from what. Our rented cabin had knotty pine walls and no TV. The bed squeaked like a bobcat dying slowly in a trap. I didn’t care. She needed a jet ski to rake the smooth water into a medium dramatic, suited to the scene. She rode it like a valkyrie in a one piece blue-black suit. Then not a bird was left on the surface; the fish went deep.

My work suffered as the weeks went by. We stayed out late in restaurants and clubs, and everywhere we went she knew someone. They hugged and laughed and drank as I floated around her – moth to the flame – and fought to make her notice I was there, but just that much. Enough to keep her from being bored with me but not annoyed; just almost on her nerves, you know? It was a high wire act; I often fell. But I had a plan that she would fall in love with me, that we could find our happiness or something near enough. I knew we were doomed, but what the hell. It seemed like a small thing to want, in the big picture of things. A long shot though, since I didn’t love her either. I loved the plan, and the fine, far-fetched idea of her.

We had lunch together every day, and she would not eat with my friends from work. I felt bad at first, but soon I didn’t care about them. I just had to watch her small and perfect hands on the white linen tablecloth, and my friends would have to understand. They did. They knew she was bad news, as shallow as a tray of ice and twice as cold. They saw right through her, but they didn’t intervene, except when they did. There was a look I got from them, or an expression maybe, meaning, “It’s your life, but take it easy pal. They say that freezing to death is like falling asleep.”

She was restless; like a dog, always on the wrong side of the door. It was all she could do to sit still through a movie. So in May, when it was warm and dry, we went for a week to Palm Springs. The breeze off the desert was light, like someone standing behind me, whispering of gravity. I was falling, no doubt. We drank Long Island iced tea by the hotel pool. She had a dream of going back to school, to finish her degree in sociology. Then she could get a better job, the kind of which I grew too drunk to understand.

I remember driving back up the long valley, with the year’s young grapes and cotton stretching to the Sierras. She dozed, off and on, through the morning, her hair tousled by the wind through the sun roof, then woke up grumpy and wanted to drive. But first, a decent restaurant. Leaving Modesto, I saw that even a warm day in the San Joaquin couldn’t bring a lasting thaw for us. She talked again about her plans as she forced my car through the late spring atmosphere, and I just watched the land roll by. They were burning the chaff of the rice fields all around; that bitter smoke can make a grown man cry. There were tiny furtive flames as far as I could see.

So what? is what she said when I told her I loved her; when I said, You can’t just move to Ohio, I love you. It was my final mistake. We were stuck in traffic behind a major accident. She was still behind the wheel, she was tense, and she was almost gone. So I had that moment of panic like when you try to launch a kite. You only have one chance to make it catch the air. Maybe it will soar and bring down a handful of cloud, or make a single frenetic loop, head high, then shatter into the grass.

So we never did have anything. We had nothing together but a desolate passage, a way of killing time. And I never was pulled from the wreckage. It’s not that no one cared, but that I was so well hidden.

Still sometimes I picture us going on into terminal twilight, hand in bony hand and tired and gray, with an old dog between us on a leash. That’s why I took that walk before dinner, out across the highway and along the edge of the hill. I cooked a little chicken soup and cleaned the kitchen quickly while it cooled, then ate it slowly, watched the evening news. The first blue flowers of spring are blooming on the hill. I could smell the dark mushroom life beneath the trees, and all the sweet damp death that feeds the roots. It made me feel alright, less a part of everything so inevitably rotting. A man upright and walking on the earth. The birds singing in the branches tried to make me smile.