Darkness

The news last week of another terrorist bombing, this time in Paris, the City of Light, was not particularly surprising.  Not at all really.  This, sadly, has become the world in which we live.

What has surprised me, though, are people’s reactions.  Via social media, the responses have been overwhelmingly short-sighted and ignorant, based in fear.  I hate to be the one to say it, but we’ve brought this on ourselves to a great extent.  And now we’ve got to deal with it.

For some reason, I’m neither optimistic nor discouraged.  It’s a fact, albeit a dark one, that we now face a radically changed world.  We’ll continue to give up our liberties and change how we perceive the other.   This is what is so sad to me.  A great measure of the joy of living has been usurped – hijacked – while we weren’t looking and while we pushed the limits of our largesse.

One reaps what one sows.  And sadly, that goes both ways.

Perspective

On days like yesterday, when I’m discouraged, depressed and disappointed, I need to remember how I felt walking into CNN Center on Monday mornings.  The dread of another week doing soul-sapping, mind-numbing work for other people clashed just perfectly with the self-induced physical discomfort and disconnect from reality (call it a hangover, whatever…).  I need to recall why it was that I chucked it all to the wind and set out on a journey with a loosely defined destination.   I’m still alive.  I’m a bit poorer on the balance sheet.  My hair is turning gray.  I don’t sleep well.  But I’m home and I’m doing things on my terms.  Successes haven’t come as quickly or in the volume that I want, but they’re mine.  I am closer than ever to the two people that gave me life.  Today is better than a year ago and infinitely better than two years ago.  I’ve reconnected with old friends and made dozens of new ones.  I know who the true ones are.  While the destination may not be completely defined, I know now where it is I DON’T want to go.   Fear is no longer part of the equation.  And for that, I’m eternally grateful.

To Dust

Free Pancakes

Today is Veteran’s Day.   The day we honor those of us who served this country in the Armed Forces.

What should be a solemn day of reflection and, quite honestly, regret, has instead become a pseudo patriotic holiday replete with all sorts of marketing tactics…deeply discounted goods and services, red-white-and-blue logos, waving flag GIFs on the background of websites and free offers.  Offers for free cups of over-priced, over-brewed coffee.  Shitty pancakes loaded with empty carbs.  Waffle fries.

So instead of saying “thank you, we’re sorry your legs got blown off,” or “we appreciate your service and we’ll try better to comfort you and rid you of your recurring nightmares,” we’ve allowed our society to say “come on down for a deep discount on a wide screen TV” and “come buy a green light bulb, screw it in to show your solidarity with these injured countrymen” knowing quite well one cannot buy just a solitary light bulb at Wal*Mart.

No, how about we honor those of us who left home, endured countless hours of boredom and bureaucracy, made our Moms and wives cry, got shot at, got poisoned, went crazy, lost a limb or lost our very lives with a promise not to ask these same things of the next generation.  How ’bout we do that instead?

That would be the best Veteran’s Day offer yet.

Jim

It’s been bothering me since yesterday morning.

Cold, rainy, fog and a persistent breeze, we’d been socked in like this for 10, maybe 12, days.  No break.  No sunshine.  Just flooded basements and leaf mold.

I made my way to Your Dekalb Farmer’s Market like I do most Monday mornings.   This time I battled depression and ever-fogging windows.  The 15-year old Volkswagen couldn’t keep up with the enormity of the Gulf’s moisture.

My last stop at the huge market is always the fresh fish area.  Clean, spacious, well-stocked, it’s quite extraordinary.   They’ll filet any kind of fish for free and the prices are obscenely cheap.  I bought 21-25 Alabama Gulf shrimp (previously frozen) and checked out the lesser parts….roe, smelts, squid tubes and legs…sad oysters suffocating under ice.   I turned to leave when the splash caught my eye.

On Mondays, the live fish tanks are normally empty, deplenished from the weekend and ready for the week’s cleaning.  But yesterday, there was a flicker of water and light and I was drawn to it.

Catfish.  A complete 4′ by 10 ‘ by 1′ tank of teeming catfish.

Except.  Except for the yellow and black head, bobbing between the flanks of the stupid fish.   He floated up and down, inhaling and submerging.  He looked my way.

I stood, marveling at the turtle, somehow mistaken for a catfish.

My mind raced.  Where did he come from?  Why was he there?  Was he for sale?  I had just read about Turtle Stew, but he was far too small for that. And besides, he was a solitary terrapin among several hundred of Dixie’s cheapest protein source.  Had he somehow sought out the delicious algae of Auburn or Southern Miss’ commercial catfish ponds? Was he parched and accidentally (perhaps fatally) seeking a drink at the time of harvest?  Was I imagining this shellback?  Should I tell someone?  Should I buy him?

He bobbed up and down. We exchanged glances.  I peered closer, making sure I was, in fact, seeing a turtle in the catfish tank.  I couldn’t see his shell, only his yellow and black head, his beak, and his furtive gasping of the air.

He submerged one last time.  Didn’t come back up.  Uh…disturbed (is that the right word?) I went to pay and leave.  I have no idea what happened to him.  Why he was there.  What would happen to him.

I’ve not stopped thinking about him.  About Jim, the errant turtle.

Right Below The Surface

This will be an exercise for me.  For catharsis and clarity.

For, um, er, exercise.  The flexing of the writing muscle.

Looking back over these pages, I realize there are dreams and actions and starts and stops.  There were amazing adventures and the pushing of self.  I regret none of it.

I’m only here, writing.  It’s the one constant, the one thing that’s always been in me.

I need it.  I know that.

Heard it All Before

oh lord, here we go again.

The One Thing

Many of my fondest food memories come from our family vacations.

My parents did not have a lot of extra money; budgets were followed and the Depression-era knowledge that each of my parents inherited from their parents’ scrimping and saving  figured large in my life.   Dad  fixed the cars, built the bookcases, landscaped the yard.  Mom balanced the checkbook, shopped the sales, put up the garden’s bounty.   But, despite whatever was going on financially, my parents always found a way for the four of us to take a week’s vacation.   And mostly, we went to the beach.

When we lived in DC, we went to  Scientists’ Cliffs on the Chesapeake Bay or to Virginia Beach at mouth of the Atlantic.  How, I don’t know…Dad was on a post-grad grant and Mother was a teacher’s aide.   When we moved to Tennessee, in the early Knoxville years when there was a bit more money, we went to Pawley’s Island, SC, paying a whopping $500 for a week’s stay at an early 1900’s beach-front rambler without air-conditioning.   Later, when they sought out something “less commercial” than Pawley’s (….as if ), we rented a privately owned, 2-room beach shack on a barrier island state park south of Charleston.

The common thread between all these places is that we ate well.   In hindsight, we ate very well.

There was a ritual to these oceanside vacations.  We’d depart as early as possible on a Saturday morning in July or August, drive the 4 to 6 hours in one of my Dad’s  Saab’s, stop at the local grocery store for the entire week’s worth of groceries, pick up the keys to wherever we were staying from whomever held them (real estate agent, neighbor, park ranger…), then descend upon our house, unload the car, claim our beds, set up house and get to preparing the first evening’s meal.

While Mom and Dad cooked and stowed, my sister and I would invariably explore the neighborhood, the woods, the beach, the marsh….whatever the immediate premises promised, we’d make quick survey of it.

Usually, that first meal was steak, baked potatoes and salad.   In our family, this meal is a “grounding” meal, one served on Sundays, at graduations and confirmations, on  arrival at some new vacation spot, at the arrival of a long-departed, much-loved relative and, mostly, just when all was right with the world.

The first “official” morning on the beach, the “rules” were  laid out:   We’d get up when we wanted to.   Breakfast was up to each of us.  Dad might surprise us at some point during the week with eggs and bacon and english muffins and fresh fruit.  Lunch was to be had after a nice morning on the beach. Liz had clean-up duties these nights:  I those.  And, with great importance, my parents would post the tidal schedule for the week, pointing out the optimum times to pursue dinner.

In the Brown family, lunch is a always smorgasbord:  cold cuts, american cheese in plastic sleeves, iceberg lettuce, cottage cheese, sliced tomatoes, leftover roasted chicken, green bean salad with onions, potato chips, dill pickles, beer with an ice cube….whatever.  After lunch, Mom and Dad  “napped” for an hour or so and we, as children, were encouraged and expected to go as far and as wide from the cabin as possible.    Ahem….

Crabbing was a sport in which none of us, meaning my Mother, Sister and I, had any interest.  But at Dad’s insistance and, through our reluctant experiential learning year-after-year, we all came to embrace it as an elemental event in the Brown Family Vacation.

The key, Dad explained each year, was to position ourselves at the outflow of a marsh exactly an hour before low tide.  This way, the brackish water would be draining from behind the barrier island into the ocean, and, with it, would come the hapless blue crabs, stupidly chasing their next scrap of food from the tidal creek floor.

So, armed with our chicken necks from the Red and White, the leaded hooks to which they were affixed and the 6 to 12-foot long runs of kite string tied to each, we’d cast our meaty lines into the quickly moving marsh water, waiting for dinner.   And we’d stand there.  In the blistering South Carolina Low Country sun.   The tiny mud crabs would emerge from their holes and  wave their single claws at us.  We’d wait.   And wait.   And talk.  And joke.  And explore.  And unwind, children and adults, unknowingly watching one of the primal forces of nature bring to us our next, glorious meal.

And then, invariably, one would amble along:  the embarassed blue crab, alternately eyeing the raw chicken neck, then us up through the water, then whatever flotsam was floating by.   But always, always, watching that chicken neck.    And, always, it went for the bird.  And with that, even an 8-year old can scoop his crab net into the water and grab the doomed bottom feeder.

Tom Brown was never more proud than when we’d load the car up with a styrofoam cooler full of live, constantly clicking, almost-hissing, crabs.  We’d drive a couple of miles past our beach cabin, off our tiny island, all of us happy, listening to Simon and Garfunkel.   On the next island, the “Gay Fish Company” sign was Dad’s signal to wheel the Saab down the sand path to a dock on a back stretch of the  marsh.  Liz and I would stay in the car while Mom and Dad picked up a couple of pounds of shrimp, right off the boat.

Once home, Dad quickly set to cooking the couple or  three-dozen crabs we’d caught.  A huge soup pot was put into action, two or three beers poured into its depths.   Once roiling, the sticky, sweet smell of boiling hops signalled it was time to send the crabs to their death.   One-by-by one, Dad placed them into the steamy barley with pathetic tongs, long past their prime.   The crabs would claw at the pot with a terrible, violent, horrible clamor in which I secretly took pleasure.

Then, suddenly, silence.

A few minutes later, the bright red crabs were pulled out of the steaming beer, placed back in the cooler, topped with ice from the Gay Fish Co. and set aside on the porch.   Mom then got to work on salad and set another pot to boil for the shrimp.   Outdoor showers were taken after last minute dips in the ocean.   When the shrimp was done and chilled on top of the crabs, freshly shucked corn was dropped into the hot water.   Gin and tonics were poured.   Music played.  Liz emerged from the shower, blond hair glistening gloriously as only an un-appreciative 15-year old’s can.  The evening breeze shifted and cooled the shack.

At the tiny porch table covered in newsprint, the bounty of our day was laid before us:   Dozens of beer-steamed blue crabs, a huge bowl of boiled, iced, South Carolina white shrimp,  drawn butter, homemade cocktail sauce, corn on the cob from a farmer’s garden a couple of islands over, a simple green salad with cucumbers and radishes and house dressing from Knoxville’s L’Orangery Restaurant.  Gin.  White wine.   Orange Juice Cocktails with marischino cherries.  Dinner rolls and soft butter.

From the beach came the constant crash of the Atlantic’s surf and the ever-increasing sound of  cicadas.  If we were lucky, the deer would quietly populate the two or three dune lines between us and the surf.

And if the universe was approving, which it invariably was, our evening walk on the beach would reveal a female sea turtle, or two, desperately laying her eggs, carrying on the traditions of eons.

I Don’t Have a Cent Where I Pay My Rent

I’m almost to the end of 3 weeks of training at the restaurant.   I think I pretty much know where everything “lives,” what the systems are, where the men’s room is, the personalities of my co-workers, what’s generally expected of me and how the ebb and flow of the night goes.   I have a great handle on the food (it’s what I’m most interested in) and the wine is coming….

But y’all, wine is hard!   Italian wine, even harder.  And a 150-bottle list, damn near intimidating.

Well, tonight we tasted dessert wines (one of the perks of training — sitting down after the shift and eating and drinking little sips of 8 or 12 bottles.  Rough duty…..).  And for the first time I felt completely comfortable with my opinions and observations on nose, taste and potential pairings.   My favorite, the Sauterne.    Wow, just wow!  Who knew mildew could be our friend?

And so I go, onward towards my food and wine test Friday.   I have two days off and I’m gonna study my ass off.  Not gonna stress about it.  Be organized.  Well-paced. And rational.

I’m happy.  The choices of two years ago were good.   Let’s see where this takes us, shall we?

Welcome

So, tired of sending resumes into the job black hole, aka internet, I decide a few weeks back to drop one off – in person – at my favorite neighborhood restaurant.   Encouraged by two friends who work there, I reluctantly went in and spoke to the General Manager.   Reluctant because this is one of Atlanta’s best restaurants, one at which I was a regular customer, one to which I took clients, and friends, and family.  One in which I was reluctant to work due to my own pride.  Pride of having an associate or friend see me wait tables (oh the shame, the horror!  more on my own moronic behavior later….).

Tonight, my first night of training, at one point I was setting a table and as I was arranging the napkins, forks, knives and bread plates, I muttered “I am so damn happy right about now.”  Happy to be working.  But more than that, happy to be picking up on dreams that I had let fall to the ground.

Onward.