Though you grind a fool in a mortar, grinding him like grain with a pestle, you will not remove his folly from him (Proverbs 27:22).

It was a Saturday afternoon in December, with cold winds howling outside the frosted windows of the old farmhouse that my girlfriend (now my wife) called home.  Christmas music was playing on the stereo.  Marci and her Mom and her sister were busy in the kitchen, mixing a batch of dough for their Lucia buns -- a Swedish holiday tradition -- and I was just standing in the passageway between the kitchen and the dining room, watching.

In between measuring, mixing, and chopping, Marci looked up at me and said, "I know the perfect job for you, Eric."

Eager to please, I said, "Sure, what can I do?"

"You could grab that mortar and pestle from up there on the window-sill," she pointed at the window overlooking the front yard of the house, "and you could grind up some of this cardamom for us."

I had no idea what a mortar, a pestle, or cardamom was; still, I went over to the window-sill that Marci had indicated and started looking around.  There was a canister full of wooden cooking utensils -- spoons, spatulas, whisks, and such -- so I pulled out a rolling pin, which seemed like the only suitable instrument for grinding anything.  "Is this what you're talking about?"  I asked her.

"No, no," she smiled in the way you might humor a toddler.  "The mortar and pestle."  The walked over to the window-sill and picked up a stone bowl and a smaller, rounded, stone cylinder.  When Marci put the items into my hands, they were cold to the touch and surprisingly heavy.  They looked slightly familiar to me, like something from an old apothecary that I might see in a movie or theater production, but I had never used such tools before.  "Here, I'll get the cardamom and bring it out to you at the dining room table."  I was relieved that I wouldn't have to try and figure out the "cardamom" part of things, which was equally foreign to me as the mortar and pestle, either.

I selected a seat at the dining room table and sat down, placing the mortar and pestle on the table in front of me.  Marci came up beside me and placed a jar of small, dried, light-brown seed pods next to the mortar and pestle.  Sitting down close to me, she showed me how to pry open the little seed pods with my fingernails and deposit the tiny black kernals of cardamom into the bowl of the stone mortar.  Each seed pod produced just two or three kernals of the spice, so it took several minutes to develop a pile of two or three tablespoons worth of cardamom.  When she was satisfied that we had harvested enough cardamom, Marci picked up the stone pestle and showed me how to use it to crush the seeds in the bottom of the mortar.  She used a circular motion that combined pushing downwards and pushing outwards, toward the sides of the mortar.  The stone surfaces of the mortar and pestle grinded against each other with a sound that reminded me of the secret door to Batman's Bat Cave opening:  a sort of cool, stony resonance.  And then, Marci handed the pestle over to me and suggested that I give it a try.  She watched, provided a few pointers to improve my technique, and then left me to my work while she returned to the kitchen with her Mom and sister.

I enjoyed using the mortar and pestle.  A pleasant aroma lifted up from the chamber of the mortar, fresh-ground cardamom filling the air like a mug of hot chai tea.  The heaviness of the tiny pestle in my hand felt primal and powerful.  I felt proud to be doing something useful for Marci's family's holiday traditions.  After three or four minutes of grinding away at the cardamom with the mortar and pestle, I brought the mortar into the kitchen and asked, "Is this good enough?"

It wasn't.  I hadn't even come close to breaking down the cardamom adequately enough for the Lucia buns.  So Marci told me to go back to the dining room and do it some more.

After a few more minutes of continued grinding, the cardamom had been reduced even further to a coarse meal of gray spices.  I felt confident that my work was finished, so I went back to the kitchen -- but once again, I was told that I needed to keep grinding away at the cardamom with the mortar and pestle.  I grew tired of using the mortar and pestle.  The stones became warm.  The friction between the two stone surfaces started to feel like the grinding of my teeth.  Several more minutes of grinding, several more trips to the kitchen for inspection, I finally finished with the cardmom, getting it to the fine, powdery consistency that was necessary for baking.  I was surprised at how much work was required to let the mortar and pestle do their work.  They were ultimately effective with the cardamom, causing it to break down over time, removing the chaff from the seeds and reducing the substance to a usable form.  But it took a lot of work.  And I was glad that it would be at least another year before I had to try and use the mortar and pestle again.