Table Manners

Severe clear. A beautiful day for a walk down to where two hollows converge. Sundry springs becoming a stream and flowing off probably to Lower Twin Creek. The edges are beginning to green, water grasses and some early cress. On the way home I collected oak galls, to study later. Back home I made a small pone of cornbread and ate the last of a pot of mustard greens, cooked with cracklings. When I eat alone, roughly 95% of the time, I eat at the island, where there's a ledge and a rock I use to prop my book. Alone, I often eat out of the pan, I might use a paper plate, for my bread, but I'll reuse it several times before I start a fire with it. Cheap bulk paper plates from Big Lots save me a great deal of water. I eat mostly with my right hand and keep my left hand and elbow on the stone surface, so I can turn pages of the book at hand. I do chew with my mouth closed. Some books, though, like Pynchon's Mason And Dixon, get rather badly stained. I was putting some food books away, there's a shelf on the back side of the double sided bookcase, 12 feet by 8 feet, that is mostly food-related text, and it goes without saying that I had to stop and reread some things. J Emery, European Spoons Before 1700; E A Hammel, Sexual Symbolism In Flatware; Villa, Bouville, et al, Cannibalism In The Neolithic. Through the rest of the day I read about things that are taboo. It's a long list, and varied. Kinship, food restrictions, manners. I'm sure, right now, I have the breath from hell, an open face sardine sandwich on toast, with a slice of onion and kimchee. I finally have to rinse my mouth out with a wee dram of single malt. I'm capable of the semi-formal or even the formal meal, I can clean up fine, though I still look like the sole survivor of an Arctic expedition; I can make small talk, or go on at boring lengths about the history of printing or paper-making. Telling stories, as they are, as if it is explaining yourself. What strikes me, is that even the very next day, I can't remember what happened. I dissected some oak galls, pretty much what you'd expect, a worm and layers of membranes that are sweet, as insulation against the cold. I made a very small batch of oak-gall jelly, that doesn't mean I'm crazy.