Monday after Sunday again
Linda has strange tastes: she doesn't like the things I like best. Oh, she does like mullet, from days growing up when Virginia, their cook, would go out in the front yard and wave a dollar bill at the fishermen just offshore as they pulled their net aboard, and close a deal with them that put fried mullet on the table for dinner.
This is the South, dinner was at noon, Linda's father came home for dinner and her mother came upstairs from her art studio. Starting my senior year in high school, I was honored to be invited to come for dinner from Time to Time. Virginia always cooked dinner, may have laid aside something for their supper, then caught her bus about two o'clock or so.
That was the early-to-middle 1950s. We last saw Virginia Baker when she arrived for Tassy's wedding at Trinity, Apalachicola in January 1997. She was over 90 at the Time, and died not long after. One of life's treasures to have known her.
But I wander: this is about my breakfast &c. Linda believes the line that Puddleglum the Marshwiggle utters at breakfast the morning after Jill and Eustace arrive at his tent and he is cooking breakfast for them, "Food for Wiggles is poison for humans,"
and Linda is clear in her mind that she is the human and Bubba is the Marshwiggle. No raw oysters. If she eats an oyster it has to be the tiniest one on my plate, and it has to be fried to a crisp. If fried, I like my oysters fried juicy, wet. My favorite is raw half-shell, a dozen salty ones on a tray of ice, and another dozen waiting; and I like them the bigger the better. The best fried oysters I've had recently were a couple weeks ago at Hunt's, a dozen enormous fried oysters and a small serving of their fried bay scallops, sweet and delicious.
After leaving Pruitt last Friday afternoon, we drove on out to Lynn Haven for late dinner early supper at Simply Seafood, our first Time there. I've delayed these years because they don't serve fried food, but the delay was a mistake. I had two dozen raw half-shell ice cold salty oysters, big ones, and obviously wild caught/harvested. I try always to remember to ask, and these were from Louisiana, most excellent.
Wandering again. Last week we drove Across the Bridge on business, and most anyTime we're over there we like to stop at Fresh Market. SomeTimes to The Carousel as well, but this Time just as far as Fresh Market. They have a superior selection of cheeses. At the fish counter I bought a pound of cold smoked salmon, lox; and a pound of lox bits for half price. Lox is delicious for breakfast, with cream cheese, and it's best laid on a crunchy Thomas's English Muffin split and toasted. I have the Thomas's, but am avoiding the bread to lower my risk of falling asleep because we have an adventure in mind, so this morning my breakfast was just lox and cream cheese. My taste buds seem to be dulling with age, so I embellished the lox with soy sauce.
Picture above just before I sat down to it. Linda is shudder NO about my lox, znd about my liverwurst and the liver pate that is at the very top of my love list along with raw oysters.
The other picture is Puddleglum fishing for eels to prepare eel stew for breakfast. That was when he pronounced food for Wiggles was poison for humans, to which Eustace, finishing his last bite of the eel stew in thick brown gravy, says "It was delicious."
That's early in the Narnia chronicle, "The Silver Chair."
Puddleglum may be my all Time most favorite of all Narnia characters. With his morose personality he could try the patience of the two children whom he protected on that adventure; but he was brave and lovable.
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My reading this morning: the fiction piece in a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine, and read halfway through another. Their fiction appeals because, unlike most stories, the ending is never quite expected. Sort of like the Civil War soldier who is hanged in "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge," Ambrose Bierce.
What do I read? Lots of stuff. Mostly short if it's fiction, although Tass does know me for selecting a book. Fiction in The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Some authors I have in files on my computer desktop. Salinger as I said the other day. Some I have thick single volume complete works in the bookcase in my study office den: Robert Frost, Ambrose Bierce, Flannery O'Connor. Used to have and enjoy Balzac translations, but the book seems to have disappeared, I don't see it there and don't recall having seen it in years. Used to have Charles Dickens, but his stories all seem to have a happy ending, which isn't the way life really is, although I remember appreciating the final paragraph or so of "Great Awakening."
Yes, it's a drear day, but Every Day Is A Beautiful Day and Life is Good.
RSF&PTL
T89&c