Paw Paws

Lake Snowdon, 17th annual Paw Paw festival. It's tempting. More rain, so I take a sponge bath and wash my hair. I make a list and head to town, whiskey for the weekend and a back-up bag of tobacco. Get a few food items for the larder, a steak, some frog legs. I always feel great about buying the one pound plastic tubes of Yoder's Cornmeal Mush. It's a buck forty-nine for a pound, which is at least four servings. Through the winter I make my own polenta, but Yoder's is just fine, with a fried egg and sliced tomato, and I love it with fried eggplant and a marinara sauce. And the fact that they call it mush, which isn't a very flattering name. Re-fried grits. On the subject of food, I was sitting alone at the bar, except for talking to Lindsey and Justin. Catching up with Justin because he'd been living in Columbus for a couple of years and he wants to come out and cook; eat, drink, and talk. When they got busy, Cory came over and took a seat, he usually does, nothing unusual, we talked about the Jeep Liberty, which I think is a decent vehicle. Out of the blue, he asked me if I wanted to be the food service guy for the pub (and another cafe owned by the same person). The head food guy. He was asking me if I would be the head food guy. It's a flattering offer. Change my name to Tomas and wear a different hat. I can't do it, of course, for so many reasons, but it's nice that Cory asked. I spent a pleasant few hours just thinking about the concept, getting a place in town, being around people, cooking, the feeling of being part of a team, making good money. The truth is that if the offer had come, years ago, I probably would have done it. I'm a good cook, but I'm not suited for the public eye. And though the ridge doesn't care whether I'm there or not, we've struck a bargain. She'll kill me if she can, but allow me to watch if I keep my place. I do my best not to impose myself. It's not even Fall yet, so I feel pretty confident. Winter is finite, but in many ways all of the year is in preparation for winter. Corn, squash, beans, a pile of books, some firewood, a path to the outhouse; and those winter phone calls from people that have central heat and hot water. Of course, it's the triumph of civilization that you could clean yourself. I actually attempt to be non-offensive. I can't pull it off, I'm offensive no matter what; but what's revealed, underneath all the surface crap, is that we all lie, fabricate, all the time. All of our fact is fiction. Well, not quite, but you get my point. TR called, from the museum, no one there, and he had various news updates for me. I'd been, as he knew, totally involved in my own little research projects, and had been paying no attention to what was going on in the world. Here I am, essentially holed-up, reading about making fly-line from horse-tail hair. I was reading the history of particular dry-flies and the transition from wet-flies to dry-flies, which I found fascinating because my uncle Fred (the shot of whiskey in his morning coffee guy, Dad's sister's husband) tied flies, and I used to watch him, amazed that he could tie two flies that looked even remotely similar. Tying flies is one of the few things that might be compared to surgery. Trying to imitate what a specific bug looked like at a specific phase of its life. It occurs to me that being around Uncle Fred was probably where I developed a taste for road kill. We'd be on our way to fish, the White River in Arkansas, or an ox-bow of the Mississippi, and he'd stop to cut out the urine-stained belly hair of a dead fox, because it was exactly the color of a male caddis fly. His wife, Aunt Pearl, fried the best chicken I've ever eaten in my life, and he was the one who pointed out that if a dead animal was still warm on a cold day it was fresh, freshly dead, and could be eaten without danger. Pearl fried squirrel and wood chuck with equal abandon. He was a shooter too, quail and dove, and eating at their house was always a treat. She made the best gravy in the history of the universe, a pan-dripping butter sauce from cooking squirrel livers, thickened with cream, one of the two or three best things I've ever eaten. Pearl was ornery and Fred was quiet and looked mean. The looking mean was just a war injury. They both drank a lot and were the very best husband-wife fishing team you could imagine. Fred could actually smell when and where fish were on the bed, he could scull a boat silently and cast a fly with his off hand. Pearl was nearly as good and could lay a fly into a pool the size of a dinner plate from thirty feet. Needless to say, I was in awe. Dad was almost that good, so I was raised in rarefied company. Good form, but certainly not elitist, anti-elitist, actually. Fred was a postman, and Pearl was a manicurist. My first fly rod was a bamboo pole with a line tied on the end. What made me think about that, was that I made some fish balls (catfish, a bit of mashed potato) rolled in cornmeal, fried, and had them with a horseradish sauce with hush-puppies cooked in the fish grease. I've eaten this meal so many times, on the banks of so many creeks, in so many variations, that it's second nature; and the smell of it, fish, cornmeal, and bacon fat, I swear, it just transports me into memory. No mediation, which I suspect is the point. That I don't have a clue. Listen, I may or not have taken more drugs than Oliver Sachs, we both started taking LSD before it was illegal and there was a lot of it around, if you knew strange people. To my credit, I've always known strange people. I think it just goes with being slow, you tend to listen, and the next thing you know everyone's confiding something. But TR thought I could slip below the radar. Tomas, the asshole, I believe he sailed away.