Stories

If indeed the Mayan belief is correct and December 20th was guaranteed to be my final supper, I would choose my menu with great excitement and freedom.

Just the thought of the world coming to an end, generates a tantalizing excitement in my belly, the mere fact, that I could devour my most favorite delicacies without consequence, guilt or social shame!

Most of my favorite foods, or “Treats” as we call them at home, are all either endangered, illegal, incredibly expensive, or so fattening, that the pleasure of eating is ruined by the consequence.

Here is my menu –

Russian Beluga caviar, straight up – great big spoonful’s please!

Hot seared Fois Gras on a slice of toasted brioche.

Fresh orecchiette with soft poached quail eggs and lots of shaved white truffle.

New York, sometimes you just step in it.

My shopping and Jill’s are very different animals – she buys cute little things for other people, whereas I buy food for myself. Well, other people will get some of it, too. I don’t eat alone. And grocery shopping in the Village – if you know where to go – is one of the great joys of living in New York City. All the stores I have in mind exist in time warps – as if they haven’t changed a bit since the early 1900’s – which is exactly the truth.

They are — each store – of Italian origin, family-owned-and-operated and scrupulously dedicated to a kind of hands-on, personal involvement in each transaction. They have pride in what they sell. We quickly dispensed with Jill’s shopping list – a gift certificate for a special restaurant, a scarf for me(!), some tchochkes (that’s Jewish for cheap, little crappy things) for drop-in gifts, the best of which is something called, “Uh Oh” — it’s a little box with a pair of emergency underpants inside — and then we set off for my shopping spree – first to Bleecker Street for a double espresso at the fabled Porto Rico Coffee Company store. Just step through the door and you shed a hundred years. A double espresso is crucial when one sets out on a shopping trip. It gives one focus, energy and a skittery sense of optimism. I also picked up a pound of their Cent’anni espresso beans for home consumption.

There is much in this world that leads us to believe that as humans, we are superior to other life forms. We have opposable thumbs, and the kind of intellect and consciousness that allow us to build more than a hive or a dam and shape our future with intellect rather than instinct. We have religions that teach us that we are “stewards” of the earth, as if we had somehow been handed a title by an unseen force who we may actually have invented.

We do not, often, look at ants as they carry a fallen comrade across our bathroom floor and consider whether we would do the same. We worry about how they got into our house, and how best to kill them. No one is going to be bothered to carry every ant, spider and fly outside – they are, after all, encroaching in our homes with their dirty little feet. We particularly hate stinging creatures like bees, hornets, and wasps. We say things like “I see a purpose for bees, at least honey bees, but the other ones don’t do anything useful.”

It has recently come to our attention that in 90 days my husband may, or may not have a job. As the House Writer, I began immediately to work on resumés, cover letters, and all manner of beguiling a lifetime of hard and varied work into an irresistible nugget of information. No spinning or glossing is necessary in this case; the man has worked hard from the time he was driving a tractor illegally through the fields of the family farm. The work, the hard, complicated part of the thing is distilling the best of him using “action verbs” (as opposed to those other, non-action verbs) and using terms and jargon expected by the business world.

As I write about his work, and think again about the many things he knows, I think about how very odd, incomplete and schizophrenic my own resumé would appear at this time in my life. As of 7:30 or so last night, I might have said something like “well, I gave up law to be a cook, and I’m not trained professionally but I’m really good at it.” Having come directly from putting 25 pounds of flank steak to bed in sealed bags of fragrant marinade, knowing that I would get up this morning and make 100 impossibly fluffy biscuits for strawberry shortcake, I was feeling pretty cocky.