Night Calls

Linda called, one of my favorite people in the world, and we talked as old friends. She was most interested in what I was cooking. We talked about marrow. Later, after I'd eaten as much as I could, I called TR and we talked about the opera. It's strange that we mostly work on this over the phone, we seldom talk about it when we're together. We lost our connection, and we both assumed it was my line that had failed, but he called back on another line later, and we talked for a long time about the ways that music and text could be integrated. A reiteration of the old song. I'll split wood, or whatever, for a while tomorrow, then cook shrimp fried rice. TR wants a piano, two percussionists, and four strings, we agree on the necessity of a soprano. Something someone said, it often comes down to that, and you snap out of the internal dialog into the exterior world. I was someplace recently, I remember, going into CVS for some batteries, and a person I hardly knew engaged me in conversation. Confronted thus I often come off as an idiot. I am, actually, an idiot, so it's an easy role to assume. Seems she had been in the audience somewhere I had read, and I agreed with her that I was 'deceptively transparent'. Still, I argued, I should be allowed my intention. Shrimp cocktail is popular at Christmas, I wonder what that means. There was an entire case full of them at Kroger. There'll be a ton of remaindered meat after the holidays, I'm hoping for a leg of lamb and something I can make into a pate. B has veal liver in his freezer and I need a pound of mushrooms (they'll be on sale too) and a pound of some other meat or poultry to go with that. I wouldn't turn my nose up at a capon or a duck. I'd love to cook some potatoes in duck fat. Speaking of fat, I had a great dinner of wilted lettuce with cornbread. Wilted lettuce is just a salad dressed with hot bacon fat, and it's amazingly good. I add a little balsamic vinegar and black pepper. With the butter I use on cornbread, this meal is a bit heavy handed, but what the hell? I usually pair this with a pale ale. Since the stove is going all the time, I've been roasting a lot of root vegetables, I just leave them on the pan and eat them at room temperature; parsnips may have become my favorite, but they are kind of hit or miss, because they need a frost to start converting the sugars, so I always sample what I might buy. A lady with her cart behind me in the produce section asked what I was doing and I explained the sugar thing, she asked how I cooked them. There's an in-house Starbucks and she bought me a coffee. We had a delightful half-hour talking about cooking. I might see her again, she said she could borrow a four-wheel drive vehicle. The tangled web. I'd taken my laundry to town, but my place was closed, so I just left the dirty clothes in the Jeep, stopped at Kroger, came home, and now, the Jeep, the next time I go to town, will smell like stinky socks. It doesn't seem fair.