the meals in your life
are numbered and the number
is diminishing

Food.

Jim Harrison.

Guilt.

Great way to start the day.

I live in a country that is somewhat obsessed with cooking, eating, weight and weight loss while at the same time unthinkable numbers of people, children, unthinkably go to bed hungry.

I read and enjoy the author, Jim Harrison but of late I have been listening to his work while I drive to work.

Audio versions of a book make sure you hear every word.

I think I have developed a mental screen that allows me to read Jim Harrison and filter out the worst of Mr. Harrison’s … earthy soliloquies* … while focusing on his word play, sentence structure and word painting observations on life that make him one of my favorite authors.

When I LISTEN to his work, read out loud and mispronounced (If I hear MACK-i-NACK one more time …) you cannot ignore those earthy soliloquies and gee whiz but he can get to the edge of social ridiculousness and go over.

And starting my day thinking about food and Mr. Harrison leaves me with a feeling of guilt.

So what to do?

Should I feed the hungry?

Should I make an apology for Mr. Harrison?

And I have only been up and about for 30 minutes.

So I heave a sigh and I say out loud a line from the Savannah based movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

The line that goes … “Two tears in bucket … mother f*ck it.”

(Okay so I faded on spelling it out … but it’s a word we have all heard)

And I am going to comment on the dinner my wife made last night.

And I going to quote Jim Harrison without apology.

Last night my wife slow cooked a pork tenderloin in barbecue sauce and made pan fried sweet potatoes with Parmesan cheese and served it with rice.

There are meals where I can lose myself in the food, the flavors.

I look up, mists clear from my eyes and time has passed and my plate is empty.

I think of that Ben Franklin quote, “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.“

There are times when I feel that way about food.

I remember the place in the Bible where the picnic cloth filled with food comes down in front of Peter and God says, “don’t say anything I made is bad.“

There were no man made food additives or improvements included in that spread.

Nothing ‘fat free.’

Nothing ‘reduced calorie.’

Take and eat, said God.

I enjoyed my dinner.

I was reminded of other good, great meals, both simple and extravagant in my life.

I wondered how many have I had?

How many good, great meals does one get to eat in life?

I thought of a line from Clarence Day’s Life with Father where Mr. Day writes, “I adjusted my cap and walked on, thinking over this future. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to be a civilized man. After all, I had had a very light lunch, and I was tired and hungry. What with fingernails and improving books and dancing school, and sermons on Sundays, the few chocolate éclairs that a civilized man got to eat were not worth it.“

Then I thought … How many good, great meals do I have left to eat?

And I thought of this passage from the 2011 essay, Chef English Major, by Jim Harrison that is reprinted in A really big lunch(New York, Grove, 2017)

Cooking becomes an inextricable part of life and the morale it takes to thrive in our sodden times.

A good start, and I have given away dozens of copies, is Bob Sloan’s Dad’s Own Cookbook. There is no condescension in the primer.

Glue yourself to any fine cooks you meet.

They’ll generally put up with you if you bring good wine. Don’t be a tightwad.

Owning an expensive car or home and buying cheap groceries and wine is utterly stupid.

As a matter of simple fact you can live indefinitely on peanut butter and jelly or fruit, nuts, and yogurt, but then food is one of our few primary aesthetic expenses, and what you choose to eat directly reflects the quality of your days.

Your meals in life are numbered and the number is diminishing.

Get at it.

Have to admit food is not the part of my life that it once was.

Sorry and sad to say that since moving to the south and its pollens and mud flats, my nose is not what it was and flavors are not what they were.

Oddly I get the subtle flavors of seafoods like shrimp and scallops over the blunt heavy flavors of a good steak.

Lucky for me I live near the sea.

Nevertheless, I appreciate food and the good foods and flavors that God has packed into that picnic cloth.

Again, I thought of a Jim Harrison passage.

It is a from one of the first essay’s of Mr. Harrison that I read and one that got me into the Harrison’s camp.

This is from the 1989 essay, Hunger, Real and Unreal that was reprinted in Just before dark : collected nonfiction, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1991)

.. one day at lunch I told some plumpish but kindly ladies what I thought was a charming story of simple food. One August, years ago, I was wandering around the spacious property of a chateau up in Normandy, trying to work up a proper appetite for lunch.

Two old men I hadn’t seen laughed beneath a tree. I walked over and sat with them around a small fire. They were gardeners and it was their lunch hour, and on a flat stone they had made a small circle of hot coals. They had cored a half-dozen big red tomatoes, stuffed them with softened cloves of garlic, and added a sprig of thyme, a basil leaf, and a couple of tablespoons of soft cheese. They roasted the tomatoes until they softened and the cheese melted. I ate one with a chunk of bread and healthy-sized swigs from a jug of red wine. When we finished eating, and since this was Normandy, we had a sip or two of calvados from a flask.

A simple snack but indescribably delicious.

I waited only a moment for the ladies’ reaction. Cheese, two of them hissed, cheese, as if I had puked on their sprouts, and wine! The upshot was that cheese is loaded with cholesterol and wine has an adverse effect on blood sugar. I allowed myself to fog over as one does while reading bad reviews of one’s own work.

I read this bit to my Mother and she laughed and laughed and laughed, shaking her head the way she could.

Let me circle back and sum it all up.

Food is a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy, but the few chocolate éclairs that a civilized man gets to eat may not be worth it.

So?

Quoting Mr. Harrison again, “Eat the delicious fat and take a ten-mile walk. Reach into your memory and look for what has restored you, what helps you recover from the sheer hellishness of life, what food actually regenerates your system, not so you can leap tall buildings but so you can turn off the alarm clock with vigor.”

*scenes of a sexual nature that may or may not have anything to do with the plot …

lead a private life
mostly because nobody
is interested

Up until two years ago when he had met Shelley he had led a totally private life, mostly because, he now supposed, nobody was interested. There was a specific sorrow and yearning to find a truly remote deer cabin, and trade the off-season rent of it for some maintenance.

From the Brown Dog Novellas by Jim Harrison.

In all those dystopian worlds, taking the definition of the word from the online dictionary which is, relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice, one of the underlying themes is that the state or for lack of better term, Big Brother, is watching you.

In 1984, the hero has to get up and perform calisthenics in front of a ‘view-screen’ that can never be turned off.

Every once in awhile the on screen group leader will yell at the hero to get his butt in gear.

I could never get my arms around that part of dystopia.

If you have cameras watching everybody, you need someone to watch the cameras.

As Henry Kissinger said of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes, 10,000 hours of tapes will take 10,000 hours to listen to.

Why, how, could or would any one single person be worth tracking if you have a Government that is totally in control of everything.

Today someone can steal my identity.

Someone can steal my list of books that I have read.

Someone can get an image of the house where I live and sometimes that image has my car in the diveway.

Well, who wants to know?

Anyone who goes to the trouble of stealing my identity will have to deal with my credit history and my credit score along with the fact that they most likely will start getting letters from the University of Michigan Alumni Association asking for money.

Good luck dealing with all that.

Reminds me of a TV cop show where some kid walked off with someone’s stainless steel silverware and the cop told him that if brought that to a pawn shop, he would have to pay the pawnbroker to take it off his hands.

Back when I was going to Riverside Junior High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan where I grew up, I volunteered to work in the school library.

One day, sitting at the desk, I started opening drawers and found a stapled together bunch of papers.

Written on top were the words, “MASTER LIST – ALL STUDENTS.”

What it was was a mimeographed list of all the students at Riverside with their name, address, phone number as well as parents names.

I looked at for a minute and said to myself, “this is cool,” and I slipped the pages into a notebook and took it with me when I left that day.

Boy of boy, I felt like I had power.

I had everyone’s name.

I had everyone’s parent’s names.

I had their phone numbers and addresses.

And there was nothing I could do with it.

If I showed to anyone I knew it would get out that I had it.

Aside from looking at the information on some friends about who I already knew all that information.

It started to gnaw at me that I had the pages and I started thinking someone might notice they were gone from the library.

Then the pages started beating like the tell tale heart in the Poe short story.

I finally said to myself, ‘SO NOW WHAT? WHAT MIGHT YOU DO WITH ALL THIS INFORMATION?”

And the next shift I had in the library, I put it back.

SO much information.

I guess I depend on there being so much information out there that my life can remain private.

Not so much that it isn’t out there, but, gee whiz, who would be interested in me?